Blog Week 2: Bloom and Marzano

The assignment for my class asked these three questions:

• How will your knowledge about Bloom's taxonomy and Marzano's research affect your lesson planning?
• Are you currently implementing these concepts? If so, how could you improve or change them to be more effective? If not, what is your plan to begin implementing them?
• How could you share your new information with your colleagues to possibly enhance their teaching practice? What is the most important information you would want to share?

The problem is that I work with students who are 18-21 years old with special needs and I take them into the community to teach them job skills.  I love my job, but there are no lesson plans.  Although, when preparing my chosen method to teach my music class how to sign a song, learn a dance, or learn how to sing a song, I use Marzano’s strategy of Summarizing and Note Taking.  For me personally, note taking is my best strategy for remembering what I need to do and always going about it in the best manner. 

As far as implementing the concepts, I do feel that we use Cooperate Learning in the aspect that our students work together to create the most effective way of completing a task.  I teach a music class and in this class I use Bloom's Taxonomy.  I teach my students to perform a song in sign language; this is the knowledge and Comprehension parts.  They have to remember what we are doing each week and they have to understand why we are signing what we are for the part of the song.  I also use Marzano's strategy of Identifying Similarities and Differences during my music class.  Last semester we learned our first song in sign and since the new semester has begun we have started to learn a new song.  When teaching the new song I made sure to pull from what the students learned last semester so that they could have a connection. 

Along with using other Marzano’s strategies, I am a huge supporter of positive reinforcement.  Whether we are at a job site or in my music class I continuously tell my students what a great job they are doing and how I think they are “Rock Stars”.  Sometimes I have to redirect or correct my students, but I always make sure to tell them something positive before the negative. 

As long as we all work together to enhance the education that our students receive, all that I learn will be shared with my colleagues and our students will benefit.