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Today’s classroom looks very different from classrooms of even fifteen years ago. Students entering the classroom today range from those with hundreds of hours of computer and Internet experience to those who have little or no access to technology. Some of our students read, write, and speak English fluently; others are second-language learners who primarily speak another language. How can we engage students with such a variety of skills and talents while providing them with important and relevant 21st–century skills like creativity and problem solving?
If we give students a traditional “choose an animal and write a report” assignment, we may have problems challenging or engaging them. Those students with computer experience may head to the Internet, copy and paste information from a couple of sources, print it out as their own, and move on. Our ELL students may not have the reading and writing expertise to really demonstrate their understanding. Using the principles laid out by Marzano’s Nine Essential Instructional Strategies and Bloom’s Taxonomy as a foundation for structuring our assignments, we can empower all of our students to think creatively and independently. The suggestions and strategies in Bloom and Marzano are rich with verbs such as compare, design, predict, develop, incorporate, and evaluate, making project design easy. When students are given an assignment that encourages higher-level thinking, the opportunity for “data dumping” (copying and pasting) is almost nonexistent. Back in the 1950s, Benjamin Bloom and colleagues developed a taxonomy that focuses on six levels of thinking. Revised in 2001, Bloom’s taxonomy provides a framework for examining the types of questions we provide our students and the thinking required to answer them. If we give tasks that draw from the four levels of higher-order thinking skills, we run into wonderful verbs like imagine, contrast, and create that help us transform the end product of our assignments to increase engagement, encourage student learning, and avoid data dumping. In exploring research about effective teaching and learning, Bob Marzano and colleagues identified nine strategies aimed at increasing student achievement by fostering higher-level thinking skills. The first in this list of instructional strategies, identifying similarities and differences, easily lends itself to creative thinking. In this strategy, Marzano stresses the importance of the ability to break a concept into similar and dissimilar characteristics. If students are able to do so, it is likely they will also be able to solve complex problems by breaking them down into simpler parts. Using Bloom and Marzano strategies does not require us to teach more content, just teach our content a little differently. Let’s look at some ways we can take what we already teach and transform the end result into a creative and unique learning opportunity for students.  Top–Ten List
Nearly every upper-elementary student is required to do a space report. Most often, the task is to choose a planet and write a report. Many of today’s students will “Google” their planets the night before the assignment is due, copy and paste a few facts, turn in the assignment, and call it a day. As an alternative, task students with creating a top–ten list of reasons why they would or would not like to live on their planets. While they can still go to the Web to complete their research, it is unlikely they will find (or will agree with!) someone else’s top ten reasons not to live on Jupiter.
This opportunity to be creative and thoughtful will help ensure they do not just copy and paste existing data and pushes them to state the facts in their own words and make connections to their own lives. This type of assignment can be used for reporting on places, people, events, animals, and more! |
