Journal #10

“A New Bloom: Transforming Learning” by David Cochran and Jack Conklin with Susannah Modin

This article is about a project that Susannah Modin created for her 5th grade students. It consisted on engaging her students in a multicultural pen pal experience with students from Finland. Moding wanted her students to not only understand the similarities and differences between the students, but also, she was interested in using technology as a medium to higher-level thinking. She used Bloom’s Taxonomy as a basis for structuring the collection survey information from students. It can be used to evaluate learners’ technology enhanced experience in more powerful and critical ways. The new Bloom’s Taxonomy incorporates contemporary research on learning and human cognition into its model. The article concludes by saying that neither the taxonomy nor the technology was the center of this project, but both proved invaluable in structuring the experience. Moding used Bloom as a way to ensure that students got beyond the simple answers and were thinking more deeply. Her objective was multicultural understanding, and her process reflected 21st century practice.

1. What is an important part of the New Bloom Taxonomy? In this new version they want to emphasize learners’ cognitive processes by including metacognitive, declarative, and procedural thought processes. The New Bloom now requires that as we plan for instruction or new curriculum, we must think about how learners process information and how they think about their own cognition.

2. Could I introduce a project like Mrs. Modin’s into my math class? Sure. For my math class I could create a project in which the students would engage in a multicultural math experience with students from France, for instance. So I would use Bloom’s Taxonomy to create questions for the survey and to collect information that would help my students learn form diverse students on their strategies and tools to learn a certain math concept.