My Classroom, my goals - Reflections of the first semester

When I started teaching at University early this year, I had no idea how I am going to engage my students with the course materials and how to make sure they apply what they learn in the classroom. For me it was a multifold process of developing learner's outcomes and overall performance objectives for the class and using cognitive approaches to design and develop instruction materials. Since teaching grad students was  something brand new experience for me, I had to understand and learn more about the cognitive approaches that experts have been using. I started with researching Bloom's taxonomy for cognitive learning. We all know that there is more than a single type of learning. Benjamin Bloom in 1956 lead a group of educational psychologists who developed a classification of levels of intellectual behavior important for learning. This classification was represented as pyramid and became famous as Bloom's taxonomy. Figure 1 below represents the original Bloom's taxonomy for cognitive learning. Later in 1990's a former student of Bloom, Lorin Anderson lead another group of researchers and updated the taxonomy to reflect it's relevance to 21st century work. Figure 2 represents the new taxonomy.

Explaining the pyramid and all it's colors will take me away from the thoughts I planned to express in this blog, but at the minimum, I can tell that I tried my best to follow the new method of cognitive learning and completed the course with huge success. To set the context for my blog audience, my course was Enterprise Software Overview and my 90% of students were successful in:

• Using their previous knowledge to define the subject
• classifying, describing and discussing the subject to develop understanding of the topics
• demonstrating, illustrating and interpreting to use the presented information in a NEW way
• examining and distinguishing the information to break into different parts for critical analysis
• choosing and defending their decisions for technology solutions they wanted to put together
• and finally designing and creating a new product or point of view

The power of Group Learning:

Apart from the Bloom's and Lorin's learning method, one thing that is undisputed and  proven very effective is the power of group learning. Self organizing team can learn on their own and I leave you with this very inspirational video by Sugata Mitra: