Language Teaching Pedagogy

An important step of lesson planning is identifying the educational goals one would like students to realize over the course of a lesson. In order to identify these goals, however, it is helpful to schematize the different levels of learning that are possible in class, in addition to what knowledge and skills are required of students for each level. Bloom's Taxonomy (pictured below) remains a popular model for visualizing the primary levels of learning, along with their concomitant can-do statements. With knowledge of how these levels build upon one another, educators can more effectively construct lessons that scaffold activities progressively, thereby ensuring that as activities increase in complexity, students already have all prerequisite knowledge to accomplish the tasks asked of them. According to this schema, before asking students to produce vocabulary, for example, teachers should first work through activities in which students simply remember and recognize vocabulary terms.

Below, one will find a visualization of Bloom's Taxonomy, along with online and library resources for conceptualizing categories of educational goals.

Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

For a more in-depth discussion of Bloom's Taxonomy, visit the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching webpage "Bloom's Taxonomy"

Why Use Bloom's Taxonomy?

The authors of the revised taxonomy suggest a multi-layered answer to this question, to which the author of this teaching guide has added some clarifying points:

1. Objectives (learning goals) are important to establish in a pedagogical interchange so that teachers and students alike understand the purpose of that interchange.
2. Organizing objectives helps to clarify objectives for themselves and for students.
3. Having an organized set of objectives helps teachers to:
   • “plan and deliver appropriate instruction”;
   • “design valid assessment tasks and strategies”;and
   • “ensure that instruction and assessment are aligned with the objectives.”

Citations are from A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.

This teaching guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License by the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching.