Data interrogation

With your performance management review and new objectives ‘put to bed', the roll-out of the annual parent's evening programme underway and the end of term on the horizon, your thoughts are bound to be turning to the teaching and learning successes and challenges of this term. You might feel that you have ‘cracked it'" with some classes but with others you are still trying to find your way. Whatever your thoughts, you will certainly be looking at the school pupil data, hoping it will help you find the way forward with all your pupils. Your performance management targets, along with continuing review of all the pupils you teach, will allow you to demonstrate your progress in this area.

Tackling underachievement

With the aid of new technologies, we are developing an ever-deepening understanding of the underachievement of specific groups and individuals, and from these insights have grown (and continue to grow) policies, procedures, research and practice aimed at promoting learning for all. The education of diverse groups of pupils from different cultural and ethnic minorities makes the daily life of schools both exciting and frustrating as teachers seek to find ways of reaching the hardest-to-reach learners. The issue of underachievement is one of the biggest challenges the profession has to face and tackling it is a national priority.

In the foreword to the White Paper, 2010, David Cameron and Nick Clegg illustrated the problem with the following statement:

'...in the most recent OECD PISA survey we fell from 4th in the world in the 2000 survey to the 14th in science, 7th to 17th in literacy, and 8th to 24th in mathematics...'
The Importance of Teaching - The Schools White Paper 2010

As we look at the achievement of our groups and the individuals within them, we have to ask ourselves if our teaching approaches are really helping all learners engage with the knowledge we need them to acquire. A close look at how we differentiate for our groups is a must. It is no easier to manage if you teach in streamed or set classes than it is if you teach in mixed-ability groups; within every group, set or otherwise, there will be different needs and expectations, styles and motivators. Hard as it is, we have to do everything we can to unlock learning for every child. This process of identifying the differences between learners and responding with modified approaches to each one is referred to as differentiation. If we are not seeing the gains we need and expect to see from our pupils, we need to reconsider our differentiation techniques, thinking of different ways of promoting learning.

Question-and-answer approaches

One of the easiest and most obvious ways of differentiating learning is to look at our classroom question-and-answer techniques. As teachers we tend to ask learners to respond most often to the knowledge recall type of question: the questions for which they are simply required to know the who, what, when, why, which and how of a particular piece of information. Teachers tend to ask these types of questions between 80 and 90 per cent of the time.

Bloom's Taxonomy is a way of ensuring that, as teachers planning for differentiated learning, we can move beyond these simple recall questions to more stimulating and thought-provoking questioning. Back in the 1950s, Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist, developed a classification of levels of questioning that are important in learning and provide support for differentiated lesson planning. By breaking down the skills required for learning into sub-skills, we can help master learning and ensure that we are promoting higher-level thinking skills. Bloom's Taxonomy reflects the thinking required in a range of categories and provides the framework for moving sequentially from concrete to abstract thinking.

The categories identified by Bloom are now variously identified in schools as knowledge and recall/remembering, comprehending/understanding, applying, analysing, synthesising and evaluating. A teachers' aid that can very effectively help you move beyond knowledge-and-recall-type questions can be created by making a book/planner marker that has each of the categories identified above with a range of extended questions. If we keep this with us when we are planning our teaching and look at the type of questions that we plan to ask, we will support ourselves and our students in moving from concrete to abstract thinking.

I have included the categories and some simple prompts for your bookmark. In some classes I have seen these questioning approaches related to National Curriculum subject levels and made into success mats, laminated and attached to each student's desk. This is a particularly effective approach as it means that, like the teacher, the students have a list of prompts to push their peer- and class-directed questioning techniques to ever higher levels.

Bloom's Taxonomy key questions

Knowledge and recall/remembering

• Who? What? When? Why? Which? How? How much?
• Describe or define
• Recall, select, list, find
• Tell me, show me, point out
• Name, label
• Remember, memorise
• Identify

Comprehending, understanding
 - Translating, interpreting, extrapolating, organisation and selection of facts

• Retell, describe in your own words
• What does this mean?
• State in one word
• Give the statements you agree with
• Outline, summarise, match
• Translate, identify, indicate, locate, classify
• Compare and contrast
• Explain what is happening

Applying
 - Using materials and equipment in situations that are new or unfamiliar

• How could you use...?
• Demonstrate how
• Show how
• Apply, construct, identify
• What would happen if...?
• How much change would there be if...?
• How would you organise...?
• Can we apply this knowledge?
• How could we use what we have learnt today

Analysing
- Breaking down into parts, relating to the whole

• Similar, like
• Chart, plan, dissect, contrast
• Arrange, conclude, separate, outline, differentiate
• Give reasons for
• What assumptions can you make?
• Categorise
• Formulate a hypothesis, predict
• Justify your decision
• What solutions would you suggest?

Synthesising
 - Creating something new

• How could you improve?
• Suggest an alternative
• What solutions would you suggest?
• Think of an original way to
• Using your knowledge, predict, create, compose, design, develop
• Solve the following, infer, state a rule about
• How else would you...?

Evaluating
 - Judging according to a set of criteria and stating why

• Appraise, judge
• Which is best? Verify, evaluate
• Find the errors, criticise
• Are there any inconsistencies?
• Product, performance
• Which information is more important, valid, better, more reliable, valid, inappropriate, appropriate?
• What do you think about... and why?
• Prioritise... and explain why
• How could you improve? Explain why
• What is important? What is not? Why?
• What would you recommend and why?
• What would you advise?

Success for all

Simple approaches like these help all learners to succeed. Bloom believed that by teaching learners at the appropriate level exemplified in skills and subsets in his taxonomy, they could make rapid progress. By constructing our questioning to help pupils learn rather than just to test knowledge recall, we can ultimately make learning more successful and rewarding for teachers and pupils.

Reference

• DfE, The Importance of Teaching - The Schools White Paper 2010, Crown Copyright