Grant Wiggins Archives

5 Common Misconceptions About Bloom’s Taxonomy

Many educators have a mistaken view of the Bloom’s Taxonomy and the levels in it, as the following errors suggest.

An authentic assessment is meant to focus on the impact of one’s work in real or realistic contexts.

Literacy / July 22, 2017 January 10, 2022 / Fundamentals, Grant Wiggins

What is ‘academic reading’? And do my students know exactly what to do when they struggle with it both in and outside of the classroom?

Technology / July 17, 2017 December 28, 2021 / Grant Wiggins

The problem: transfer of understanding is poor. Students do not understand that the long-term and bottom-line goal of education is transfer.

Teaching / June 26, 2017 December 28, 2021 / Grant Wiggins

Mastery of a complex whole requires designing backward from the complex whole and the interesting questions related to it.

Without models of student work to validate and ground them, rubrics are often too vague for students to be useful.

Teaching / May 27, 2016 January 16, 2022 / Essential, Grant Wiggins, Trending

Where should there be obligation and where should there be freedom in choice of pedagogy, models, and curriculum?

Teaching / May 20, 2016 January 16, 2022 / Grant Wiggins, New Teacher

Good questions to guide teacher lesson plans should help move the teacher from ‘What will students do?’ to ‘How can I help them understand?”

The point of school is not to get good at school but to effectively parlay what we learned in school in other learning and in life.

Teaching / January 28, 2016 January 16, 2022 / Grant Wiggins, Veteran Teacher

“Coverage” is ultimately an egocentric delusion, a form of teacher blindness that because we teach it, students will get it & appreciate it.

To achieve understanding as an educator, you have to help students ‘by design’ come to realizations that they own and appreciate as insightful.

These are simple prompts that a teacher who has really thought through the course should be able to answer.