Bloom's Taxonomy: A Structure For Structuring Legal Education.

Bloom's Taxonomy is a structure for planning particular classes, courses and learning assessment tools. The Taxonomy provides an analytic structure which mirrors much of the structure of legal education. Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives is a tool for designing courses, individual classes, and methods of assessing student learning. It is a classification of educational objectives, described in terms of the ways we want students to act, think or feel as the result of participating in a unit of instruction. The Taxonomy focuses entirely on the learner and the kinds of behaviors student exhibit as they learn. Because legal education defines much of what it seeks to achieve in terms of the learners' behavior, the Taxonomy provides an appropriate foundation for legal educators to use in all aspects of the teaching-learning process. This session will suggest ways in which Bloom's Taxonomy can be used to design objectives and goals for courses, structure individual classes, including the kinds of questions to use to determine the level of student learning, as well as to develop new assessment tools, or modifying existing assessment tools to ensure that we test for the kinds of behaviors which reflect the types and levels of learning we have established as our goals and objectives.