So many of the science experiments my textbooks gave me were not experiments at all! An experiment has an unknown outcome. The whole point of doing an experiment is that you don’t know what will happen. You’re discovering something new! Experiments lead to the unexpected. The same is true for an investigation or any sort of inquiry-based task. If students “investigations” lead them to the exact same, already known fact – it wasn’t really an investigation, right?
Most “experiments” or “investigations” I ran in science class were actually demonstrations. They led to very predictable outcomes.
Now, it’s not bad to do a demonstration. Just don’t mistake it for the high levels of Blooms. It’s a starting place, but you don’t want to stop there. When we demonstrate, we’re merely helping students Remember and Understand some facts. We need to know how we’re going to move beyond Remember/Understand.
Get Past “Understand” As Quickly As Possible
Let’s say we’re demonstrating how a one-way mirror works. As I teach the material, I’d want to check frequently to see if my students “get it.” Do they understand the how light passes through matter? The low levels are important, but we want to move through the those levels of Bloom’s as quickly as possible.
Once my students are at the Understand level (ie, they can correctly explain how the one-way mirror works), I want to set up the Analyze step. To me, Analyze is the pivotal level of Blooms that makes higher-level thinking possible. I wrote more here.
Generate Related Ideas
The first thing I think of is to go cross-curricular. A unit about one-way mirrors is really about how two people can perceive the same thing differently. So when else can two people perceive the same thing differently?
- Optical illusions?
- A political speech?
- A song?
- A story with an ambiguous ending?
- I think of that blue/gold dress that was popular a few years ago.
- The Mona Lisa’s face is often considered strangely ambiguous.
We’d spend time coming up with specific examples of situations where people perceive the same thing differently. I would add my own examples (the Mona Lisa might be my contribution) and students would add their own examples (which are often unexpected and amazing). We’d have a huge list of ideas.
Time To Analyze
Once we have lots of examples (20+), we can Analyze. At analyze, we’re comparing, contrasting, and categorizing. So I’d have students create categories of our examples. They’re forming criteria and noting similarities. They get to decide how they’d group Mona Lisa’s smile, the weird dress, an ambiguous song, etc. This should be done as individuals or in groups of 3. You’ll end up with lots of different categorizations of the same examples.
Note, the Analyze step has to be set up correctly. Don’t give students the categories and ask them to fit the examples. That’s Understand, not Analyze. With Analyze, they MUST decide on the criteria for their categories – including how many categories they will even have.
- 🚫 Put the examples into these categories: something you hear, something you see, or something you feel. (This is not Analyze).
- ✅ Put the examples into a few categories. Use whatever criteria you think is most interesting.
This will take some time. To scaffold, I always ask students to start by forming pairs. Then they expand those pairs into groups.
Then you can have your students explain how they reached their categories. See how this is high-level thinking? Students are coming up with new ideas. Do it ten years in a row and you’ll still get ideas you’ve never seen before.
Evaluate
At this point, you can move to Evaluate. Students can form opinions about the categorizations. They might look at others’ groupings and decide which is the most surprising/unusual. They might pick an example that was the most difficult to put into a category. I wrote more about the Evaluate level here. They key is always to have a specific criteria.
Synthesize
This lesson has been following the general guidelines of Hilda Taba’s Concept Formation model of instruction.
- Brainstorm lots of examples of something.
- Students create their own categories of those examples.
- Once the categories are complete, they explain their thinking behind the categories.
A Concept Formation lesson ends with students generating a statement. If you use Depth and Complexity, this is a Big Idea. The categories will help students to form a new idea about the topic.
In this case, I’d be asking my students to create a sentence about these ambiguous situations. They might come up with something like:
- Sometimes you can’t even trust your own senses.
- Our brain tries to understand what it’s seeing, but sometimes gets confused.
- Making decisions means relying on more than what your senses tell you.
I have no idea what your students will come up with! And that’s the beauty of a lesson that actually climbs Bloom’s to the high level. Your brightest kids have the chance to knock your socks off.
Always Move Up Bloom’s
This plan purposefully moves students through the levels of Bloom’s? Of course, not every student needs to do everything (But that’s the point of differentiation). Some students might have trouble explaining the initial phenomena. They’d stay at the early steps. Only people who “get it” will move up to the higher level. Some years, no one will get all the way through!
But that’s how I differentiate. I plan for a super-high ceiling and make sure that there are scaffolds in place for