Data visualisation: My Teaching and Bloom’s Taxonomy

This week the meaning of my visualisation can be taken quite literally: An area for growth. 

I analysed my lessons from Monday to Thursday with the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, “which classifies thinking into behaviors organised into a series of hierarchical levels” (Barkley & Major, 2016, p.5).  The taxonomy focuses only on the cognitive part of a lesson and not on influences classroom management or emotions. The hierarchy ranges from the lower-order thinking skill ‘remembering’ to the higher-thinking skill ‘creating’. You can see all six levels in this legend: 

Each petal symbolises one task on the according level. Each leaf on the individual stems represents a class level: 

My visualisation of my teaching this week shows me that the tasks in second grade are all on the three lower-thinking levels. This is an area I can improve in and keep in mind for preparation for the next quintal of the school year. In fourth, fifth and sixth grade, the proposed tasks reach the higher levels as well. You can tell that ‘creating’ was a big part of the lessons for fifth and sixth grade. 

This data collection made me think and gave me a chance to analyse my teaching and evaluate lessons, especially the complexity of tasks on different class levels. I am genuinely looking forward to exploring my teaching data further over the next weeks! 

Reference:

Barkley, E.F. & Major, C.H. (2016) Learning assessment techniques : a handbook for college faculty, San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass.

3 Replies to “Data visualisation: My Teaching and Bloom’s Taxonomy”

  1. Your dataviz is so much more attractive than the standard interfaces that usually characterize teaching dashboards etc. Tracey’s question is a really good one for reflection as a teacher using data about one’s own pedagogy. Would you want a manager to view this? How might it be used for, say, teacher evaluation? But the most striking thing for me is how you’ve used the hierarchical taxonomy of thinking skills as a metric to assess your teaching. In this sense, you have done exactly what many developers of teaching dashboards do–take a specific ‘model’ of education, make it measurable, and then deploy it as a way of assessing and representing either the teacher or the student. But as you’ve acknowledged, there will always be a lot more going on in the act of teaching than a single metric can capture.

  2. Hi Francesca,
    Loved your method for visualising this.
    If a dashboard did this analysis for you, what do you think your reaction would be? Would you share this kind of information with your students? Would you be happy with your managers having this data (automatically and ongoing)?

  3. Beautiful visualisation … inspiring ! Once I understood the leaves the flowers part was easier to extract information from. Curious about the understand petal for 6th grade…. any reflection on the activities behind it ?

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