Activity 1: For or Against Cooperative Learning?
Activity 2: Bloom's Blooming Taxonomy


Activity 1

Title: For or Against Cooperative Learning?

Instructional Strategy: Critical Thinking

Purpose:

This activity is designed to help students generate instances in the past when they were involved in successful and unsuccessful cooperative learning situations.

Objectives:

• Identify instances when students engaged in cooperative learning situations.
• Identify what attributes students connect with success and failure of cooperative learning.

Student Activity:

Think of an instance in which you were in a cooperative learning situation in high school or in undergraduate school. Then on a piece of paper write down what made this experience a success or a failure. Design an ideal cooperating learning situation for the grade level and content area that you will be teaching. Draw from your own experiences as well as information from the text.

Variation:

1. Focus on the successful cooperative learning stories and discuss in groups of three to four if your experiences had any: (1) motivational effect, (2) cognitive-developmental effect, and (3) cognitive elaboration effect.
2. Role-play in groups of four to five a successful cooperative learning event.
3. Work in groups to write down lists of cooperative learning failures. Pass slips to other groups and have them come up with ways to address these problems and improve the cooperative learning experience.
4. In groups consisting of students from different content areas, design a cooperative learning activity for a chosen topic that integrates all of the content areas.

[Top]

Activity 2

Title: Bloom's Blooming Taxonomy

Instructional Strategy: Creative/Critical Thinking

Purpose:

This activity is designed to help students apply Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.

Objectives:

• Distinguish each category in Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.
• Identify examples of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.

Student Activity:

Work in pairs and follow these directions: (1) choose a chapter from the textbook that you want to teach, (2) devise activities that will aid the learning of the content in the chapter within all six categories of Bloom's taxonomy (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation), (3) in your groups teach the class using one of these activities for seven to ten minutes, and (4) discuss and debrief the activity.

Variation:

1. Write a two-page paper on justifications of why each activity you created fit each of Bloom's categories in the taxonomy.
2. The instructor will randomly pass out slips of paper with verbs that address each level of Bloom's Taxonomy (e.g., list, describe, break down, evaluate, combine, judge, etc.). Draft an instructional objective, question, and activity using the verb as a prompt.
3. The instructor will randomly pass out slips of paper with different levels of Bloom's taxonomy noted on them. Create activities, alone or in small groups, at that level for the current chapter of Psychology Applied to Teaching.
4. Conduct a six-person discussion about the importance of each level in Bloom's Taxonomy. Have each member of the group be responsible for different levels.
5. Have a small group discussion on which levels of Bloom's Taxonomy represented the largest amount of previous educational experiences. Determine why these levels were/are emphasized and whether or not this is ideal.