Teaching Strategies

How healthy are my Teaching Strategies? Thinkers Keys Blooms Taxonomy Multiple Intelligences

How healthy are my Teaching Strategies?

Ask yourself…

• What is my purpose for asking this question?
• What outcomes do I hope to achieve?
• Who’s asking the questions and doing the talking? (Teachers usually ask many more questions than the children/students. The less we talk, the more we encourage others to talk.)
• How many times do I ask a question and automatically answer it myself?
• Do I allow and value silent reflection/thinking time?
• Am I patient, allowing plenty of opportunities for learners to reflect and make meaning?
• Do I model active listening?
• Do I provide opportunities for learner’s questions and welcome their questions?
• Do I help learners clarify their questions so they can ask what they really want to know? (Helping them to express their hidden questions)
• Do I encourage discussion and conversation?

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Thinkers Keys

The Thinkers Keys are a series of strategies designed by Tony Ryan, used to develop creative and critical thinking. You will find examples of the Thinkers Keys throughout the Picture Magic resources.

For a greater understanding and use of the Thinkers Keys as a means of extending creative and critical thinking, visit www.tonyryan.com.au

Thinkers Keys Examples for Frogs and Habitats

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Blooms Taxonomy of Thinking Skills

What on earth does Taxonomy mean?

(psst… it just means classification… no bull!)

In the 1950’s, Benjamin Bloom described his Taxonomy. It has become a standard in educational thinking and introduced the idea of thinking as having a hierarchy from simple to complex, from lower to higher orders. We want children/students to wonder, to consider a range of possibilities, to compare, explain, decide, discriminate, form opinions, judge and interpret. Bloom’s Taxonomy is an excellent framework to help us do this.

During the 1990’s, a former student of Blooms, Lorin Anderson, revisited the Taxonomy and some changes were made.

The names of the 6 major categories were changed from nouns to verbs to reflect the active process of thinking. Knowledge was renamed Remembering, Comprehension renamed Understanding and Synthesis renamed Creating. The order of Synthesis and Evaluation were swapped as it was thought that Creative thinking was the most complex.

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Multiple Intelligences

The theory of Multiple Intelligences was developed by Howard Gardner of Harvard University in 1983. He describes different intelligences through which people think, learn and process information. The possibility of a 9th intelligence is focused around existential intelligence. This is about the nature of existence, but the court is still out on this one.

Imagine all these potential pathways to learning!

The more of these you can combine the better!
We all learn best in different ways,
so offer many possibilities.

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