Day 5: Bloom's Taxonomy and Research Questions
Now that students have a good understanding of the types of questions they should be asking, they need practice actually writing them! This lesson was extremely helpful to our students because, while they knew "yard" questions were the kinds they needed, they didn't know how to write them! For this activity, we provided students with a Blooms Taxonomy question starter page, and together we wrote questions based on a content area topic that we already had a significant amount of background knowledge on. This was helpful because in order to write higher level thinking questions about a topic, the student needs to have some level of background knowledge on the topic before being able to write a higher level thinking question about it.
The way we structured this lesson was starting out by selecting a topic then modeling writing a question or two using the Bloom's Taxonomy question starter prompts. We also threw in some non-examples. Students tend to "plug and chug" words in the blank, and sometimes it wouldn't make sense to research.
For example, I believe a student wrote, "What are the pros and cons of sea turtles?"
Ha, like I said, it takes practice.
Download this Bloom's Taxonomy Questioning page here.
After modeling one or two questions, I allowed students to craft their own and share with the class. As a class we decided if that fit, and if it was a researchable question. If it wasn't, then we talked through how we might change it to make it one.
By the end of the end of the activity, we concluded that the Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating questions were the types of questions we wanted to write for our Genius Hour projects.
In our experience, even with the prompts, students still do need help with writing a good question based on their interests. Feedback, feedback, feedback...oh, and the upcoming activities help them get to that independent level!
