Blooms Taxonomy Higher Order Thinking Skills - Essay Example

The article is quite relevant to my classroom work. After acquisition of knowledge, I need to teach my students to take it to other levels of understanding, applying, analysing, and evaluating. This way, education will be relevant to them and to the entire society. In addition, this type of learning provokes students to innovate new ways of doing things and stop depending on others for intellectual knowledge. Having taught for many years, sometimes I do not need to carry teaching guidebooks to my lessons.

This is because during my college years, my lecturers used Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) related educational objectives teaching methods, which have influenced my teaching skills greatly. I particularly recall an incidence when our general subject lectures tested our HOTS. Each of us received a copy of 150 words with information on a certain national anthem of a country in Africa. The first step was a test on how well we can vividly remember the words. The lecturer divided us into groups of three and we were supposed to do a presentation to the class.

After thirty minutes, many students could memorise the Anthem. Next, it was required of us to give meaning to different words in the anthem. The lecturer helped us on the complex words that we could not comprehend and later gave us instructions to write an article of something we believed in to determine if we could apply the knowledge learned in real life. We satisfied the lecturer that we could really apply what we had learned and he proceeded to ask meaning of different phrases in our articles.

The whole setting was exciting and the entire group of student’s mood was set up. We even wrote new articles in different contexts of things we believed in, after which we evaluated the new articles describing their purpose and their relevance in real life. When in class with my students, I have learned the importance of applying Blooms higher order of thinking skills. My students are alert at any given time and their level of understanding is quite high. For instance, when I was teaching a topic on angles and elevations, I encouraged the students to think beyond basic formulas.

The purpose of any kind of learning is to enable the student to gain knowledge. After a week of thorough learning on this topic, I wanted to know how much my students had absorbed. Therefore, I called for an impromptu maths class to review this topic. Students were required to recall a wide range of materials in relation to different angles that exist and the formulas for their calculation. According to Saint Paul Public schools, “Knowledge represents the lowest level of learning outcomes in cognitive domain” (Saint Paul Public Schools).

At this point, I took advantage of giving the students examples other than those given in classes to test if they could transform the materials from one form to another. Students could solve given problems with the knowledge, theories, and concepts of angles learned in class. Satisfied that students could remember and apply what I had taught them, it was time to analyse if the students got the deep meaning of the topic. One of the question I recall asking is “what is an obtuse angle.” The questions continued until I was quite sure that most of the students, if not all, were well versed with the topic.

Later on, students formulated their own questions on the topic, some that included real life problems. For instance, one bright student’