Bloom’s Taxonomy

You’ll sometimes hear the team refer to “BloomBloom's Taxonomy Bloom's Taxonomy is a way of writing lesson plan objectives using specific words so that the objectives can be measured. See https://make.wordpress.org/training/handbook/guidelines/blooms-taxonomy/ for more details.’s TaxonomyTaxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies.” when talking about objectives and assessments for the team’s lesson plans. So what is that?

Bloom’s taxonomy is a set of three hierarchical models used to classify educational learning objectives into levels of complexity and specificity. The three lists cover the learning objectives in cognitive, affective and sensory domains. The cognitive domain list has been the primary focus of most traditional education and is frequently used to structure curriculum learning objectives, assessments and activities.


The models were named after Benjamin Bloom, who chaired the committee of educators that devised the taxonomy.

Wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_taxonomy – accessed on 15 June 2019

That’s a bit more in-depth than the team gets with Bloom’s Taxonomy though. We use it to help write objectives in a way that can actually be measured. For instance, an objective of “Upon completion of this lesson the participant will understand how to …” – how do you measure “understand”? So rather than use words like “understand” or “know” we require words like “identify” (as in a multiple choice question) or “use” (as in do an exercise successfully).

So here’s a few words (verbs) that we like to begin each lesson plan’s objective with:

  • Identify
  • Explain
  • Create
  • Demonstrate
  • Use
  • Recognize
  • Define
  • Choose
  • Modify
  • Write
  • Solve
  • Summarize
  • Locate
  • List

This example of Bloom’s taxonomy is a good reference because it helps to better make the leap from “understand” to actionable “doing”:

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