Supporting gifted and talented students in your PDHPE class
A useful tool to encourage higher order and creative thinking processes for gifted and talented students is Bloom’s Taxonomy. The table below outlines some sample activities, based on Bloom’s Taxonomy, which could be included in a Stage 5 Ball Games unit to encourage higher order thinking processes with gifted and talented students.
Bloom strategy | Definition | Sample teaching and learning activities |
Knowledge / remembering | Retrieve relevant information |
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Comprehension / understanding | Construct meaning from oral, written and graphic communication |
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Application / applying | Carry out or use a procedure in a given situation |
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Analysis / analysing | Break material into its parts and determine the relationship between each part and their relationship to the whole |
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Synthesis / creating | Put elements together to form a coherent or functional whole, reorganise elements into a new pattern or structure |
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Evaluation / evaluating | Make judgements based on criteria and standards |
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Bloom’s Taxonomy is not just a tool for planning teaching and learning activities for gifted and talented students. In order to differentiate the curriculum for mixed ability classes, teachers can develop activities encompassing the full range of cognitive processes for all types of knowledge. Work involving knowledge with lower cognitive demands e.g. remembering and comprehending, can provide the smaller steps in the learning sequence that students with special learning needs require to develop their understanding of concepts. Gifted and talented students should primarily be engaged in the more complex processes of analysing, evaluating and synthesising information. Gifted and talented students should also be learning to think about the learning process and developing an understanding of their own problem-solving strategies.
