My lesson plan and Bloom's Revised and Digital Bloom's Taxonomy

While researching the differences between Bloom's Revised Taxonomy and Digital Bloom's Taxonomy, I first thought of my lesson plan on "Re-cancellations."

As background, I teach employees how to make specific changes to health insurance policies.  When coverage under a policy is no longer needed, a cancellation is processed and unused premium is refunded to the insured.  Sometimes a refund is sent to the insured and later a payment the insured made for coverage is returned as insufficient funds.  An attempt is made to collect the refund back from the insured, but at times it is not possible to recover the funds.  In order to clear our accounts of the returned payment, process of a re-cancellation is needed.  Due to legal requirements, we cannot take away coverage from the insured by backdating the cancellation to equal the time of coverage that the amount of good premiums paid for.  In other words, if cancellation is processed effective October 1st, we cannot change the date to September 15th to make up for the loss in premiums.

The very first statement I make when teaching re-cancellations is for my trainees not to expect to understand the "whys".  I instead focus on the tasks needed to clear the account.  In this way, I am following the taxonomies by not requiring that the student progress through the steps in order.  I need to get the trainees to learn how to clear the accounts (because there are deadlines from our accounting auditors) before I worry about them understanding the implications of the entry and where we get extra "money" from to clear the account.

Usually it does not take very long for trainees to make the necessary entries to clear the accounts.  What is much more challenging is getting them to a level where they can explain what a re-cancellation does (other than to clear an account.)  It seems like almost every day we hear how social networking is our company's future and that instant messaging and blogging, among other technologies will eventually come to pass.  A way to increase the higher thinking skills needed to understand the other aspects of re-cancellations is to require students to explain the entire process to a "customer" using a blog (I would be the customer).  I would also require them to "draw" a picture of the process and post it on a wiki with the other students.  This would be a welcomed activity for the visual learners in class as well.