How to empower and enrich your grammar teaching with Bloom’s Taxonomy

Wanna know why teaching with Bloom’s Taxonomy is so great? Because it helps your students learn better, practice their skills in a cooler way, and gain a deeper understanding. I love varying up my lessons so that they do involve all the levels of learning. Having students do different activities just makes my teacher heart that much happier. And the biggest advantage: they understand grammar rules much easier and can apply them better when they’ve looked at them from all angles!

Bloom’s Taxonomy may be something you’ve heard of while in college, or it may be new to you. I’m here to explain it to you, in easy language – hopefully – and with some clear examples for language teaching. My free Great Grammar Lesson Road Map was designed to incorporate a variety of levels, so if you want to grab that right now you’re already on the right track!

What is Bloom’s Taxonomy?

Bloom’s Taxonomy divides cognitive goals into six levels of learning that are hierarchical in complexity and specificity. In order words, there’s lower order learning and higher order learning. To really get students to master a subject, teachers should apply different levels of the Taxonomy to their lessons so that all orders of thinking are exercises by students. Students will be prompted into deeper learning that way.

The order of the six levels is as follows: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. Each level may build on the one that came before. Briefly explained, the six levels are:

• Remember → Recall facts and basic concepts
• Understand → Explain ideas and concepts
• Apply → Use information gathered in a new situation
• Analyze → Connect ideas
• Evaluate → Justify an opinion or decision
• Create → Produce new or original work

Skills from each of these levels are important. For each of the levels, I keep a list of verbs that signify actions I want students to take that match that level. They are shown in the picture below:

How to use Bloom’s Taxonomy in the classroom

In my lessons, I try to mix up my activities so that they ask both lower and higher order thinking skills from students. This way, the activities are varied, and different skills will be practiced by the end of a cycle. I try to take something from each level, although that doesn’t always apply. When I’ve done a lot of remembering and understanding activities – for example, vocab or grammar study – I want something to follow that makes students apply this new knowledge, evaluate it, or even create something new with it.

Activities to teach Bloom’s Taxonomy

Activities for Bloom’s Taxonomy I do that fit with my language lessons are:

• Remember: memorize grammar rules and vocabulary words, list words you come across when reading books, repeat pronunciation of new words.
• Understand: summarize what was said in a text or video, explain a grammar rule to a classmate, translate vocabulary words found when reading books, categorize new vocabulary words.
• Apply: present a sentence with the correct use of the grammar rule, use vocabulary words correctly in a new text, reenact a play we read together, solve a crossword puzzle.
• Analyze: compare and contrast two types of texts, deduce the meaning of words in a text, link what we’ve read or watched to something we learned previously.
• Evaluate: argue a stance during a discussion, support arguments with examples, reflect on behavior or performance, review an object or performance.
• Create: write a new text using correct grammar, blog about a topic or an experience, compose lyrics or a poem, design a poster, simulate a news broadcast or documentary video.

Bloom’s Taxonomy with examples

So let me give you a clear example of a cycle I’ve done on Christmas carols. I wanted my students to learn about Christmas and Christmas carols, as well as be able to write something new themselves, to get into the Christmas spirit. It was an extremely fun lesson cycle – it took me about 4 lessons – to to:

1. Remember – We memorized Christmas vocabulary words.
2. Understand – We used a cloze text to fill in the Christmas words in the correct spot.
3. Apply – We read Christmas carols and determined their meaning.
4. Analyze – We asked ourselves what makes a good Christmas carol.
5. Evaluate – We gave our opinion on good and bad Christmas carols, listened to others, defended our view.
6. Create – We wrote our own Christmas carol and performed it.

Use Bloom’s Taxonomy teaching grammar

My most important point with this blog post, is that we should always try to achieve higher order thinking when it comes to grammar teaching. We must teach them the rules, and have them practice it with worksheets or textbooks. But after that, we must also ask students to use what they’ve learned in new situations, and even create new pieces of text with it. Get students to use the grammar rules in the correct way in a news article, lyrics, a letter, a blog post, a video, you name it. That is what’s going to make it stick, I promise you! Check out my free Great Grammar Lesson Road Map to find some of my ideas for writing and speaking in a higher order kind of way!

Challenge is good!

Teaching with Bloom’s Taxonomy in mind is incredibly fun but can also be challenging. If you have any questions about it, do let me know!

Check out my other articles on grammar teaching below:

How to combine games with learning a super fun way

How to make English grammar practice fun

Or check out this article on Bloom’s Taxonomy in the flipped classroom!