Aiming Higher: Bloom and Vygotsky In the Classroom

My friend and colleague Judith Cantin and I were working on this idea that Bloom's Taxonomy and Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development could be put to concrete use in the classroom. As we worked on this, we came up with an idea we hope you'll find worth exploring: targeted learning should fall in the ZPD, but the learning activity shouldn't. This activity should mobilize knowledge, skills or competencies from a higher level of Bloom's taxonomy, when possible.

This Pedagogical Quickie is a bit longer, running 10 minutes or so. But if you're already comfortable with the concepts of Bloom's revised taxonomy or Vygotsky's ZPD, you can skip at 5:45 to see where Judith and I came up with the idea of merging the two.

At the end of the video, there's a blank Bloom/Vygotsky Hybrid Cylinder (Creative Commons 3.0 Canada) that you can use for analyzing/evaluating different learning activities and scenarios your considering for class.

Judith and I took different things out of our working together on this. If you understand French, you can take a look at her take on the matter here:    • Processus cognitifs et environnement ...   .

Enjoy!