How to plan a lesson with Bloom’s taxonomy.

01What is Bloom’s taxonomy?

It is a classification of thinking processes, proposed by Benjamin Bloom in 1956 and revised in 2001 by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl. The revised version, the one used today, has six levels that go from the simplest to the most complex. Each level is expressed with verbs that describe something the student does and that you can observe.

Level	What the student does	Useful verbs
1. Remember	Recognizes or recalls information.	Define, list, identify, name
2. Understand	Explains ideas in their own words.	Explain, summarize, paraphrase, give examples
3. Apply	Uses what was learned in a specific situation.	Solve, calculate, use, demonstrate
4. Analyze	Breaks something into parts and sees how they relate.	Compare, distinguish, organize, relate
5. Evaluate	Judges using criteria and defends that judgment.	Argue, justify, assess, critique
6. Create	Combines what was learned to produce something new.	Design, propose, compose, develop

6Create

5Evaluate

4Analyze

3Apply

2Understand

1Remember

02How to plan a lesson with Bloom in 5 steps

1. Define what students should achieve by the end

   Write the objective with an observable verb. “Understand fractions” cannot be checked; “explain why two fractions are equivalent” can.

2. Choose the right level for this lesson

   Not every lesson has to reach “create”. If the topic is new, it makes sense to start with understanding and applying, and move up a level in the following lessons.

3. Design activities that match the verb

   If the objective is “compare”, the activity must ask students to compare, not to copy a definition. This is where most lesson plans fail: the objective says one thing and the activity works on another.

4. Assess at the same level

   If you taught students to analyze, do not assess them only with recall questions. The question, the exercise or the rubric should require the same kind of thinking as the objective.

5. Move up a level across the sequence

   Think of several lessons as a staircase: remember and understand at the start, apply and analyze in the middle, evaluate and create at the end of the unit.

If the objective says “analyze” and the test asks students to “remember”, they learn to memorize, not to think.

03Example: a 45-minute lesson on the water cycle

Science, upper primary school. Lesson objective: students explain the stages of the water cycle and relate them to everyday phenomena they observe.

• Opening, 5 minutes (remember). Brainstorm: what happens to the water in a puddle when the sun comes out? The words that come up are written on the board.
• Main activity, 20 minutes (understand). Using a diagram of the cycle, students explain each stage in pairs, in their own words: evaporation, condensation, precipitation and runoff.
• Practice, 15 minutes (apply and analyze). Each pair receives three situations (a cold glass that “sweats”, morning fog, clothes drying in the sun) and matches them to the right stage, justifying their answer.
• Closing, 5 minutes (evaluate). Exit question: “If there were no evaporation for a day, which stage would stop happening, and why?”

04Common mistakes

• Verbs that cannot be observed. “Understand”, “know” or “learn” do not say what the student will do. Replace them with verbs from the table.
• Always staying at the lower levels. If every lesson asks students to remember, they memorize but do not learn to think with what they know.
• Objectives that do not match the assessment. Teaching students to argue and then assessing them with true or false questions confuses them and does not measure what they worked on.
• Too many objectives in one lesson. One or two well-covered objectives are worth more than five barely touched.