The Achievement Chart is a rubric that outlines the performance standards of four categories of

knowledge and skills (i.e., Knowledge and Understanding, Thinking, Communication, and Application).
Within the Thinking category, there are three criteria of skills and processes that students are
prompted to develop and demonstrate and they include planning skills, processing skills, and
critical/creative thinking processes. Within the description of each criterion are examples of these skills.
Below are lists of the ways in which these criteria are realized:
Planning skills
formulating
questions
generating ideas
gathering
information
organizing
information
focusing research
outlining
brainstorming
listing goals
selecting strategies
and resources

Processing skills
analyzing
evaluating
inferring
interpreting
editing
revising
refining
forming conclusions
detecting bias
synthesizing

Critical/creative thinking
processes
creative and
analytical processes
exploration
problem solving
reflection
oral discourse
evaluation
metacognition
invention
reviewing
justifying conclusions
critical literacy

Recently, there has been resurgence in the educational classification system known as Blooms
Taxonomy. This system recognizes and organizes the process of thinking into different levels:
remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluation, and creating. These levels of thinking can
be seen in the Achievement Chart criteria for students and serve as essential tools in guiding teachers
planning of daily lessons and assessments.
One idea that I am going to incorporate into my daily teaching is the explicit instruction of the skills and
processes identified in the Achievement Chart and Blooms Taxonomy. I want students to be able to
identify these skills and processes by name and ultimately, to understand how to execute them and
recognize them in their own and others work. Such instruction would be critical for students as they will
encounter the names of these skills and processes in success criteria, learning goals, rubrics, and in the
questions they will be asked to respond to.
I chose this idea after having read the Asking Effective Questions document from the Literacy and
Numeracy Series. In this document, the practice of asking open questions that are related to the
enduring understandings of the curriculum is described as being extremely important. This is because
open questions allow students to gather information through the process of their own reasoning
fostering the development of critical thinking and reflection. However, it also describes instances when
it is preferred that teachers convey information explicitly. One such instance is in teaching students the

language they need in order to identify a concept. For example, students may know how to collect
information from different sources and combine them into a new, coherent product, but they may not
know that this process is called synthesizing. This reveals potential issues in the Achievement Chart as
students are expected to demonstrate such skills and processes (e.g., analyzing, inferring, evaluating,
justifying) but do not have the explicit instruction in the names of the concepts or perhaps, even, what
they entail.
This same document gives eight tips for asking effective questions, of which, the fifth tip is related to the
aforementioned issue. The fifth tip explains how incorporating verbs that elicit higher levels of Blooms
Taxonomy (e.g., observe, contrast, interpret, distinguish, consider) is important for deepening student
understanding. If I want to incorporate such verbs in my open questions and other areas of practice, I
need to make sure that they are meaningful to my students that my students understand what they
mean and can therefore respond appropriately.
Q: As ideal as my plan sounds for explicit instruction on the skills and processes, I do worry that in
reality, the terms used in the Achievement Chart and Blooms Taxonomy are too complex for junior
students. What are some ways that I can make these terms meaningful for junior learners?