1. Intellectual Challenge of Teaching
By: Julie Wethy

2. Expectations What are you expectations of your students?
Teachers who take responsibility for student learning recognize challenges students and their families face but are convinced that those challenges do not prevent learning and that a strong education will serve students (Sleeter, p.128)
Thinking outside the curriculum planning box
Creating high expectations for your students enables them to use higher thinking skills
Are the students engaged in lessons the lessons you are teaching or are they bored?

3. Meet Juanita Juanita had high expectations of her students
She taught BEYOND the general teaching standards.
She equipped her students with the knowledge needed to meet her expectations
Juanita incorporates multicultural material where applicable.
Her students created six books on the computer over the course of the school year.

4. Curriculum Planning
Bloom’s taxonomy is a helpful and useful planning tool.
Here are four questions to help you work through Bloom’s Taxonomy:
How does the unit as you have planned it so far, or as you have taught it before, address each of the six levels of Bloom’s taxonomy
How do the curriculum standards for the unit you are developing address the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy?
How does the books address the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy?
Using the Bloom’s taxonomy as a guide, if your students were to be prepared for college, what should they be learning in this unit that isn’t listed above?

5. Cognitive Domains of Bloom’s Taxonomy
Knowledge
Comprehension
Application
Analysis
Synthesis
Evaluation
Educational
Objective
Recall information such as dates, events, places
Recall major ideas
Explain what information means
Interpret information
Translate knowledge into new context
Order, group, infer causes
Predict consequences from information
Use information, methods, skills, or concepts in new situations to solve problems or answer questions
Recognize components and patterns
Organize parts
Compare and contrast similarities and differences
Use old ideas to create new ones
Generalize from given facts
Relate knowledge from several areas
Combine different ideas or concepts
Discriminate between ideas
Assess value of evidence supporting ideas
Make choices based on reasoned argument
Recognize subjectivity
Associated Verbs
List, define, tell, describe, identify, shoe, label, examine, tabulate, quote, name, who, where, when
Summarize, describe, interpret, contrast, predict, associate, distinguish, estimate, differentiate, discuss, extend
Apply, demonstrate, calculate, complete, illustrate, show, solve, modify, relate, change, classify, experiment, discover
Analyze, separate, order, explain, connect, classify, arrange, divide, compare, select, explain, infer
Combine, integrate, modify, rearrange, substitute, plan, create, design, invent, compose, formulate, prepare, generalize, rewrite
Assess, decide, rank, test, measure, recommend, convince, select, judge, evaluate, discriminate, support, conclude, compare, summarize

6. Mini University - Mona
Mona’s 4th grade solar system unit in relationship to culture, academic expectations and Bloom’s levels of thinking
Students work from a syllabus, internet research, write reports in word documents, and use power point to create their presentations.
Her solar system unit was linked to literature and language arts
She organized students into cooperative groups according to knowledge and comprehension levels
She engaged students in learning and thinking across the spectrum of Bloom’s taxonomy.

7. Enabling Strategies
Assist students in learning how to think more complexly than they do presently by themselves such as modeling
Believing that students need to learn facts and skills before they can go on to more complex ideas
Drilling students on the basics to prepare then for higher level work
Focusing less on the structure of disciplinary knowledge than on the process of knowing

8. Scaffolding
Bridges students’ current academic performance with potential
Stage 1- building knowledge of the topic
Stage 2 – the teacher talks through text construction with students
Stage 3 – the teacher jointly constructs texts with students
Stage 4 – Students write independently

9. Meet Gina Discovery of the English Language Development (ELD)diet
The use of explicit instruction, scaffolding, and/or modeling in her Spanish classroom instruction
She teaches the students to create literacy analysis on books being read individually and as a class

10. Possibilities and Challenges
Build relationships with your students and use the relationship built to model learning and enhance the teaching-learning process (Sleeter, p.145)
When you feel passionate about what you are teaching it is easy for students to get excited and become passionate about it too.
Set high expectations for your students
Look beyond what you think they can do and accomplish