Are we wrong about Bloom's Taxonomy?

Submitted by Kathy Tracey on Sat, 03/17/2018 - 15:15
  • 2484 Views
  • 7 Comments

Friends,

I invite you to review this article about Bloom's Taxonomy. The author, Ron Berger - Chief Academic Officer at EL Education, discusses the impact of this taxonomy and the influence on curriculum and instruction. Points raised in the article include: 

  • The pyramid implies that cognitive processes are discreate, independent of each other. 
  • The implication is also that some skills are more difficut, and therefore more important than other skills. 
  • The pyramid implies a hierarchial set of skills. 
    • Therefore, does this imply that knowledge /remembering are the least important skills and we should, as educators, focus on higher-level skills?

Does this implied hierarchy devalue the importance of basic, or foundational, knowledge?

I invite you to read the article and share your thoughts? Would this change how you approach instruction? What are your thoughts? 
 

Sincerely, 
Kathy Tracey
@Kathy_Tracey

Comments

Hi Bret,

I really like your 'blooming' model. There is room for feedback and that is a critical element of instruction. Often, once a student completes a project, they often feel like they are 'done'. It's so important to build the feedback as a part of the overall model. I also love the communication element. I believe it builds a relationship with the student. 

Thanks for sharing!

Kathy 
@Kathy_Tracey

I can appreciate the author's point of view. Bloom's taxonomy can be a useful guide to plan out learning in advance. For instance, many instructors lean toward student understanding. The word "understand" is complex enough. Bloom's is a reminder that we can ask students to discuss/evaluate/compile/calculate/etc rather than "understand a topic" or "demonstrate an understanding." It allows you to get very specific about the skills you want students to achieve by the end of a lesson, the end of a course, or the end of a program. There are other renditions of Bloom's that display the skills in a more holistic way, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_taxonomy

The article is thoughtful, and got me thinking.  I especially liked the comments about how knowledge and understanding are related to and integrated with higher-order thinking processes.  But this a problem-naming article.  I think Bloom's is useful because the big boogeyman is still the old idea that school is about content/information/knowledge not skills/practices/habi.  The old idea is that school is supposed to teach you a bunch of stuff you're supposed to know.  Bloom's at least takes us one step closer to educating people into a set of skills that enable them to be effective citizens. 

Knowledge is becoming less and less important with technological tools (Google, calculators) putting all the facts at our fingertips.  You don't need to know how to multiply if you have a calculator.  But you do need to know when and why to use multiplication.  Schools at their worst used to teach us only 'who' and 'what' (knowledge). Bloom's helps us a bit to shift towards 'when', 'how', and 'why' (skills).  A bit of a non-sequitur here: Similarly, content standards can become an excuse to fetishize all the specific different 'whats' on the list "important information" are thereby do harm.  However, when they can be empowering when they serve as a tool for helping teachers contextualize all of the information they need to teach within meaningful thinking, applying, analyzing, synthesizing and creating.

Hi Josh,

You make several good points about too much emphasis on teaching content, especially disconnected facts, at the expense of skills and habits of mind. My understanding of the article is that knowledge and content are important for the application of skills throughout the learning process.  It is not an either or proposition.  While Google and other technologies put facts at our fingertips,  to be most effective they do require knowledge and content to know what to search for and a basis of knowledge to examine the new information with a critical eye.  It's not so much knowing disconnected facts, but having a rich base of content knowledge  within a bigger picture that serves to  understand the why and helps build further knowledge (see E.D. Hirsh) .  Skills without a basis of content leads to a superficial understanding of how the world works and what to apply those skills to. 

My background is in K-12 and there are some important differences between the two. For example, adults have already gained rich content in many different areas.  However, I think the best teaching, whether with adults or children, is teaching that combines content with skills. Like you point out, teaching random facts is not particularly effective.  But. as the article argues, teaching skills without the context of understanding  is not effective. 

Thanks,

Steve

I love where this discussion is going! I found the article on Bloom's Taxonomy interesting -as it sheds some light on how we, as educators, may percieve the importance of teaching higher order thinking skills - sometimes at the expense of the building blocks of recalling facts and basic concepts. But this idea of potentially moving to the 'higher order' thinking skills of drawing conclusions and evaluating information is based on incorrect knowledge in the first place. I invite you to review this LINCS post from the Science Community of Practice: When is Backgrounk Knowledge a Barrier to Science Education.

As educators, we recognize that adults come in to the classroom with a variety of skills and abilities - but what happens when that foundational knowledge is built on incorrect information? How do we move our students toward the higher skills when we need to revisit the foundational knowledge.

I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Sincerely, 
Kathy

 

 

Steve,

Bloom's framework definitely makes the different pieces of the thought process seem more discrete than they actually are.  Every framework that attempts to explain human thought will do some violence to the actual dynamics of inquiry and understanding.  My point is simply that the direction that Bloom's framework pulls the adult ed. teaching culture is probably a healthy one overall: Towards emphasizing transferable skills more than we do now and facts less than we do now.  Breaking out the "higher level" thought processes as separate categories makes it more likely that those things will be taught explicitly.  I think your emphasis is actually similar to mine: Skills and content need to be married together. "Skills without a basis of content leads to a superficial understanding of how the world works and what to apply those skills to."  The flip side of that is that knowledge of a canned set of facts or domain-limited technical skills defined by a curriculum, or more often by the available education materials, does not make the process of mastering new domains of knowledge much easier.