Blogging + Bloom’s Taxonomy= 💡?

Teachers often tell me:

I’d like to start a blog , but I don’t know what to write about!

Photo by Monstera: https://www.pexels.com/photo/pensive-woman-at-table-with-papers-6237993/

Just do it!

Blogging is my favourite CPD tool and I can’t recommend it enough! I’m saving lesson plans and templates I create, I’m recording/reflecting on my learning journey, not to mention connecting with so many wonderful ELT colleagues all over the world!

Just an idea

I know it might seem daunting though, especially at first.

So, I thought that maybe Bloom’s taxonomy could be your guide to blogging? It could help you come up with/organise ideas for your posts.

It might be easier to take a bottom-up approach, i.e. start from the bottom and when you feel more confident, try a more challenging writing task.

Here are some blogging ideas for each level.

Remembering

• If you attend a conference/workshop, you can share your notes. Sandy Millin’s blog is a great example. You can also create visual notes, like Emily Bryson does.
• Share your favourite quotes from books/articles.

Understanding

• You can summarise your takeaways from events you attended/articles you read. Check out Nuri Arda’s post here.
• Perhaps you can try to explain terms in your own words.
• Maybe you can even write about what YOU think you understood and ask your readers questions. I did that here.
• If you’re taking a course, you can write weekly/monthly unit summaries like I did when studying the Trainer Development module.

Applying

As Katherine Bilsborough beautifully puts it: ..when we read things, watch things or listen to things, we need to make connections, join up the dots and reflect on how something relates to, or impacts on, our work.

• Think about where/when you can apply these ideas in your own context. In this post, Zhenya and Svetlana discuss how the ‘exit ticket hand’ activity can be used.
• Take photos of your whiteboard to demonstrate how you teach grammar/pronunciation, or how you generally organise your whiteboard. Check out how I used the whiteboard when I taught my Dogme lesson.

Analysing

• You could discuss the pros and cons of new methods/techniques you discover. I’ve written a DELTA M1 Paper 2 Task 3 post about teaching idioms here.
• Write about a self-observation task you did. What did the data show? Here’s an analysis of my teacher talk.

Evaluating

• Write about an article/book you read or a webinar you watched. Do you agree/disagree with the writer/*speaker? Why/why not?
• Write a book review, Jim Fuller has published loads of them on Sponge ELT- read them here. Martin Hajek has also written some great ones, you can read them here.

Creating

The options are endless!

• Your top ten tips for something.
• a lesson plan : I’ve published lesson plans and teacher’s notes here and you can find a long list of blogs here.
• a tool or template you want to share. I love Svetlana’s polite-o-meter!
• a tutorial -check out Anthony’s Youtube Channel for ideas.
• training materials-here’s Monica Peachey’s amazing website.

Some more links

Many thanks to Adrienn Szlapak for writing this post. I didn’t know August 5th is Blogger Day!

150 more blog post ideas here!

Why Blogging is still Crucial for Your Business?

Feel free to share more ideas/links in the comments!

*All the blogs mentioned in this post are fantastic, (my personal opinion) and they have a range of interesting posts which you should definitely take the time to read! I’m not trying to ‘label’ them, just mentioned some of their most popular categories 🙂.

This work by Rachel Tsateri is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.