Literacy Now

For more than 60 years, generations of teachers have used Bloom’s Taxonomy in their planning and teaching.

The taxonomy is a means of categorizing the level of abstraction, specificity, and complexity in the questions and tasks we pose to our students. There are six levels in the taxonomy: Knowledge/Remembering,  which is the lowest level and is characterized by simple recall of facts. Next is Comprehension, which includes inference, compare and contrast tasks, and understanding information. The third level is Application, solving problems and using knowledge. Analysis asks students to look for patterns and organize parts. Synthesis is where new learning takes place, using existing knowledge and ideas to formulate new ones and to bring together knowledge and facts from different areas. The final level, Evaluation, is assessing what has been learned, including one’s own ideas.    

Although all six levels are important, my experience as a mentor teacher, plus discussions with colleagues, revealed that many teachers concentrate heavily on the first three levels (i.e., knowledge/remembering, comprehension, application), neglecting the last three (i.e., analysis, synthesis, evaluation).

This is unfortunate, because learning does not take place in the first three levels, but in the last three. One reason for this neglect is that many teachers find it difficult to incorporate the entire taxonomy into their planning and teaching. Yes, it can be difficult initially, but if we want to facilitate new learning, using all six levels is critical.

I offer here a research/writing project, suitable for fifth grade and up, that effectively incorporates all levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.  The following are the guidelines I gave my students.

Giraffes in Hawaii

There are giraffes in Africa but none in Hawaii. You live in Hawaii, and you’ve always loved giraffes. You decide you are going to bring giraffes to live in the wild in Hawaii, but you realize you can’t just go out and bring over a bunch of giraffes. There are many things you have to know, many questions you have to identify and answer first. Once you have the answers to your questions and the knowledge you need, you can decide whether your project will work. Here, then, is your assignment:

After researching giraffes and Hawaii, write a comprehensive report stating whether you believe healthy giraffes brought from Africa will survive in Hawaii. “Survive” here means three things: they will remain healthy, they will reproduce, and their offspring will remain healthy and reproduce.

Step 1: Make a list of all the questions you need to answer.
Step 2: Research “giraffes” and “Hawaii” to answer the questions.
Step 3: From your research, draw conclusions about the possibility of giraffes surviving in Hawaii.

Remember: There is no right or wrong answer in this assignment. You will be graded on three things: the quality and completeness of your questions, the quality of your research (these two account for half your grade), and how well you support your final conclusion, that giraffes will or will not survive in Hawaii.

Compare this kind of task with simply assigning students a report on giraffes or on Hawaii. Either one of these addresses only the first three levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy: knowledge, comprehension, and application. True, the assignment will sharpen research skills and may add somewhat to the student’s overall body of knowledge, but it does nothing to require or even encourage original thinking. Postulating the survival of giraffes in Hawaii, however, requires students to think at all six levels of the taxonomy. They have to know, comprehend, and apply what they know, organize it, relate knowledge from different areas to help them draw conclusions and, finally, assess their conclusions. Even the first step in the assignment, making a list of questions to be answered, requires all six levels. Questions about food, climate, terrain, and predators all require a student to organize information so as to make comparisons between Africa and Hawaii.

Without question, of all the hundreds, if not thousands, of reports I’ve read as a teacher, “Giraffes in Hawaii” were the most interesting and the ones that demanded the most of my students.

David G. Gardner is an education professor at Antioch University located in Seattle, WA. 

How we approach teaching language arts writing is affected by the influence of the digital era. On the one hand, there is the unprecedented importance placed on writing as a means of connecting, sharing, and relating among people.  On the other hand, the fast-paced nature of our times often results in writing that looks more like a blurry snapshot than carefully crafted art.

It is no longer enough to teach strategies like the five-paragraph essay for writing success: an introduction, a conclusion, and three body paragraphs, connected by a general idea expressed concisely in a thesis. Students need to gain awareness and understanding about writing and their own role as writers.

To offer our students an opportunity to access their own thinking about writing and to do so in a multiage setting to garner deeper insight, we embarked on the Writing Argument Project—a multimedia exploration of the changing nature of writing.

The project

Eighth-grade language arts students and second-year college students who enrolled in Freshman Composition entered a video dialogue to produce a series of 12 short videos about the role of writing in today’s world and their own lives.

To make this project important to students, part of their overall grade was assigned to the Writing Argument Project portfolio and participation in video production. The portfolio included written reflections, video contributions, and artifacts that captured students’ attention.

Every video explored one important question related to writing. As a class, students brainstormed and selected this question, followed by discussions in smaller groups to further assess complexity and decide which specific aspect of the question to include in a video. For example, one video explored the question “What is good writing in the digital age?”Subcategories selected by groups were truth, ethics, speed, and clarity.

There was minimum direction as to how groups should produce their 20- to 30-second clips. Some groups had each member introduce his or her artifact, some groups selected a spokesperson who combined the ideas from the entire group, and some groups opted to act their ideas out. Clips were recorded by either the instructor or students and then assembled into one video that was shared with their partners.

When a video was received, it was viewed in class and discussed according to these prompts:

• How is it similar to the ideas we explored?
• What new angle/perspective does it bring?
• How is it allowing us to build our argument further?
• What question would we want to explore in the next video?

The format of short videos, without a lot of room for elaboration, encouraged students’ thinking to focus. The multiage setting added to the experience: The college students were amazed by the younger kids’ energy, enthusiasm, and fresh look on things, and the eighth graders benefited from a sense of responsibility to self and others.

Growth

As the project progressed, students were getting increasingly excited to both receive a video response from their partners and to create one of their own. Their portfolio reflections captured a shift in both groups’ dispositions towards writing (with certain similarities and differences, most likely due to their ages).

Here we have a couple examples that show how students started to identify themselves as writers in the 21st century:

“In this century almost everyone writes every day. It may be a book or an essay for school, but it’s also in the emails we send, the text messages and even just the captions on pictures for Instagram. I might not have a big role in writing in this century, but I do still have one, however small it is.”

“You don’t have to publish books or even be a gifted writer to be heard and understood. I believe that this is a very good thing—voices are being heard and just about anyone can hear them. Just as anyone can speak, anyone can listen.”

Furthermore, both groups came to the realization that writing can be a powerful tool for change in the 21st century. However, younger students attached more meaning to writing as a way to affect change than did their college counterparts. As one student recorded, “Writing is a very powerful and effective tool. It can be used for many things, such as starting a local article to bring changes to your town or city.”

College students, on the other hand, showed a larger shift in their thinking about the writer’s ability to clearly deliver a message to the reader: “This project made me think about how what I write communicates to the reader and gave me more appreciation for the art of writing: to think more, to go more in depth.”

The Outcome

The Writing Argument Project made students recognize that no matter how big or small the contribution, it matters. Whether composing an essay for a class, writing a speech to deliver to the United Nations, or simply sending a text about spaghetti noodles, their writing matters. Above all, it is their voice that matters most, and writing is a way to make that voice heard.

Arina Bokas, Ph.D., is the editor of Kids’ Standard Magazine and a faculty member at Mott Community College in Flint, MI. She is the author of Building Powerful Learning Environments: From Schools to Communities and a producer of The Future of Learning TV Series. Connect with Arina on her website. Jessica Cleland is an eighth-grade Language Arts teacher and a Culture of Thinking coordinator at Clarkston Junior High School in Michigan. She has presented at professional development conferences around the world.

When I tie my shoes, I no longer say to myself, “OK, first make a bunny ear….” I never once took a quiz on the steps of shoe tying in order to prove I understood the bunny strategy.

Literacy strategies should be just like that: Students are weaned off of them when they are no longer needed or when a particular strategy proves to be unnecessary, impractical, or ineffectual.

Teachers are always on the lookout for the newest strategy to fix student literacy issues. Websites like Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers are full of strategy examples (unfortunately, many pilfered from the work of others and recycled with a new graphics) to distill the process of comprehension and understanding into an acronym. We can teach students to UNRAAVEL, RAP, UNWRAP, SCRIP, GIST, SOAPSTONE, THIEVES, SWBS, KWL, or SQ3R their text. These strategy acronyms are printed on posters, charts, and packets of worksheets. The hope is that if students memorize and follow all the steps in the acronym, “deep comprehension” (feel free to substitute other phrases like “fabulous writing” or “high-level thinking” as needed) will result.

Consider lit circles. Although intended as a way to help students practice critical conversation about text through various lenses, lit circles can easily become packets of role sheets completed before a mechanical and disjointed conversation—a round robin exercise that is little more than having students read their role sheet aloud. The goal of academic conversation is lost because the completion of the role sheet is what students see as their focus.

Don’t misunderstand, I think strategies have value.

However, I worry that a hyper-focus on steps and acronyms distracts from the real purpose of teaching strategies, which is to give students a way to organize information in text and encourage deep thinking when necessary.

Role sheets, acronyms, and posters are tools, meant to be temporary. The goal is to teach students to understand when a strategy would be helpful and give them options when they need to use them—and when they don’t.

The bunny strategy for shoe tying might not work for everyone. My little brother learned it as “wrap it around the loop and push it through.” With my own kids, I found it easier to just buy them shoes with Velcro straps.

Just as every student doesn’t need a reading strategy in every instance. Voracious readers who love to share their ideas do not need to be reminded to stop and annotate every new plot point to prepare for a small group conversation. In fact, stopping the flow of the reading becomes frustrating and cumbersome, doing more harm than good.

Strategies and acronyms themselves can easily become the learning target instead of comprehension and understanding. Students are sometimes quizzed and tested on the acronyms, not the learning gained from the text. If you give a quiz or assignment to make sure students can label the parts of the strategy, you might be missing the point.

Let’s look at a couple of examples where the assignment focused more on the parts of the strategy than on the actual learning students should be doing:

Example 1: “Okay, students! For full credit, you need to find and annotate six examples of places where you visualized and four examples of places you made text-to-text connections. You also need to stop and make at least three predictions as you read your book independently.” What if these particular annotations don’t make sense with the students’ text? What if they get wrapped up in the reading and forget to stop?

Example 2: “Good morning, learners! We have been talking about context clues. In your packet you need to show you can label what you have learned. Does each passage selection contain a definition/explanation clue, a contrast/antonym clue, or an inference/general clue?” Should the point of the lesson be to identify the clue correctly or to determine the meaning of the word based on the clues given?

Strategies are meant to be temporary. They are meant to give students a way to organize their thinking, to support and nurture their success until the thinking process reaches automaticity. The goal is to teach students to understand when a strategy might increase their understanding and then allow them to use their chosen strategy flexibly, according to their task and need.

Here’s my advice for deciding when to use a strategy in class:

Be selective. Before you introduce a strategy, ask yourself the following questions: How many of your students need this type of strategy? Is it useful in other situations or disciplines? Is it for fiction or nonfiction? Is it too complicated or cumbersome?

Be flexible. Make sure students know that some strategies will be more helpful to them than others in certain texts. Remind them they can choose what makes sense for them.

Be careful. Strategies are intended as a means to an end. They are not the end.

Julie Scullen is a former member of the ILA Board of Directors and also served as president of the Minnesota Reading Association and Minnesota Secondary Reading Interest Council. She taught most of her career in secondary reading intervention classrooms and now serves as Teaching and Learning Specialist for Secondary Reading in Anoka-Hennepin schools in Minnesota, working with teachers of all content areas to foster literacy achievement. She teaches graduate courses at Hamline University in St. Paul in literacy leadership and coaching, disciplinary literacy, critical literacy, and reading assessment and evaluation.

Although many insist on blaming some children’s disinterest in reading primarily on the distractions caused by electronic gadgets in their lives, a child who finds it difficult to read is unlikely to pick up a book and read it, gadgets or no.

By the end of the third grade, students are expected to be able to read independently and proficiently. However, current indicators in fluency and comprehension are extremely low in many parts of the world, and a vast number of children are embarking on their fourth-grade journey while struggling with the most important skill needed for academic success.

The struggle in reading and the reluctance to read are strongly connected. The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), defines the reluctant reader as “the teenager who, for whatever reason, does not like to read.” I took the liberty to extend this definition to include the children of 9 years old and above, because this is the age when they are supposed to be proficient in reading and may not be. Here, we find a vicious circle in which struggling readers become reluctant readers that don’t improve their proficiency and on and on. We learn reading by reading, and we will enjoy it more when we are better at it.  

Addressing this issue has become a matter of priority for policymakers, educators, and publishers. Many approaches include the use of technology to encourage reading; however, the production of new, innovative, and diverse reading programs is an urgent necessity.

I have struggled to find fun fictional reading material for children over the third grade threshold in Arabic, both as a bookstore owner and as a mother. During the past decade, production of Arabic picture books has experienced relative growth, though it is still modest and lacks diversity. The young adult genre has always benefitted from classic literature written for adults. Nevertheless, the tweens arena is sorely lacking, filled mostly with translations and sporadic original attempts. So I decided to write for tweens, and I was determined to write a series. I learned from my childhood experience that if readers like a title in a series, they will look for the next one. 

The idea of writing a series fascinated me. It meant creating long-term characters with many stories, a variety of experiences, and a diversity of themes.

Soon after the launch of the Hind and Saif series, I was invited to schools to meet students, many of whom were reluctant and struggling readers. Talking to students firsthand was priceless and rewarding and made me realize that I created a special niche through which I could offer my young readers an enchanting reading experience that they will seek to repeat outside the classroom, transcending any academic obligation. Such experiences are the first steps towards creating readers—lifelong readers—and thus breaking the vicious cycle of reading reluctance.

Flora Majdalawi, an ILA member, is an Arabic children’s author and publisher. For 10 years she has focused on producing fiction and nonfiction literacy resources for primary students. She has authored more than 20 titles in the differentiated graded Arabic reading series Discover the Fun of Reading. She is also the author of the tweens realistic fiction series Hind and Saif.

Suzy, known as “Zu”, is devastated when she hears the three words from her mom: “Franny Jackson drowned.” Franny was Zu’s best friend. Zu couldn’t believe that Franny had drowned during her vacation in Maryland because Franny was a good swimmer. The only explanation that made sense to Zu is that an Irukandji jellyfish sting caused Franny’s death. In her notebook, Zu wrote, “Maybe she is dead because of that jellyfish sting.” To prove her theory, Zu studies jellyfish and secretly plans her trip to Cairns, Australia, to meet a jellyfish expert. As Zu recalls her memories with Franny, it is revealed that Zu’s friendship with Franny was over long before Franny’s death. Zu felt sad and betrayed as Franny, who used to be her best friend, was fading out in Zu’s life. While Zu clung to the long-gone friendship with Franny, Franny hung out with other girls who didn’t care much about Zu. Zu’s emotional journey begins before and continues after Franny’s death. 

Cross-Curricular Connections: Language arts, science, geography

Ideas for Classroom Use

Changes in Friendship

Zu and Franny used to be best friends, but their friendship falls apart as they enter middle school. Franny made new friends, leaving Zu alone. Do you think the friendship between Zu and Franny naturally fell apart or do you think Franny intended to break up with Zu? Do you have friends like Franny who you like but the friendship falls apart? What do you want to say to Zu or Franny about the change in their friendship?

Speech Collage

In the YouTube video, the author of The Thing About Jellyfish, Ali Benjamin, said this book is about a lot of things. What do you think this book is about? If you have to pick one keyword for the theme of this book, what word that will be? In class, each student can take turns, and students will be able to hear the recurring words as well as with the new words that they didn’t say.

“Travel Route”

Zu attempts to fly to Cairns, Australia, to meet Dr. Jamie Seymour, professor of biology and jellyfish expert. Find Cairns, Australia on the map. How far is it from your home? If you were Zu, what would your travel route look like? Plan your trip from your home to Cairns, Australia. How long it will take? What do you need to prepare for this trip? What do you need to know about Australia before you fly?

K-W-L Chart on Jellyfish

Zu studied the topic of jellyfish and gave a presentation in class. Make a K-W-L chart on jellyfish. K: What do you know about jellyfish? W: What do you want to know about jellyfish? L: What did you learn about jellyfish? Briefly research jellyfish online. Share your findings with your small group members.

A Note to Zu

Zu thinks to herself in the book, “I knew I didn’t deserve happiness.” Assume you happen to hear this when Zu was saying it to herself, and you want to write a note to her. What do you want to say in your note as a friend? How might your note help her to feel better about herself?

Additional Resources

Author Ali Benjamin on The Thing About Jellyfish: A short video clip on the author’s introduction of the book, The Thing About Jellyfish. Some of publishers’ online reviews are included at the end of the clip.

Author Ali Benjamin’s homepage: More information about Ali Benjamin and her books.

Additional Literature With Similar Themes

Addie on the Inside. James Howe. 2012. Atheneum Books for Young Readers.

Fish in a Tree. Lynda Mullaly Hunt. 2015. Nancy Paulsen.

Jongsun Wee is an associate professor at Winona State University in Winona, MN, where she teaches Children’s Literature and Language Arts method courses.