My Ed Heroes #2 – Benjamin Bloom

Who in the field of education hasn’t heard of Bloom’s Taxonomy?  My guess is that relatively few educators haven’t.  If you’ve heard of the taxonomy and have found it useful in defining the objectives of your teaching, then you are indebted to Benjamin Bloom.

Bloom was a psychologist who is most famous for organizing educational objectives according to their cognitive complexity.  This is, of course, Bloom’s Taxonomy.   Bloom was consumed with investigating thinking and learning.  In fact one of his great hopes was to find a way to replicate the educational results that were achieved through 1 to 1 mastery teaching in the group instructional setting.

Benjamin Bloom is My Ed Hero #2 because the number one pedagogical reform that I would like to see in education is a move toward encouraging students to contend with real-world/authentic problems that elevate their engagement with material to a higher order of thinking on Bloom’s Taxonomy.  The habits of mind that Deborah Meier (My Ed Hero #1) places at the center of curriculum are a perfect example.  Each of the habits of mind requires thinking about information that you are presented with in a more sophisticated and important way than simply remembering and understanding it.  Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy provides a simple framework for creating instructional objectives, measuring outcomes, and evaluating the quality of teaching.

To me Bloom’ Taxonomy is the single most important guiding principle in education.  You hear about the taxonomy so much because it is the best structure we have for determining whether a learning task is of high cognitive complexity or not.    What’s disappointing to me though, is that at k-12 schools and institutions of higher learning across the country, instruction is still more often focused on the lower hanging fruit of understanding and remembering.  Bloom’s book introducing the taxonomy was published in 1956.  Despite being a welcome and much discussed guide for designing educational objectives and assessment and despite widespread desire to foster critical thinking, we still, after more than 50 years of having the taxonomy, create instruction as if information was something to dump into students’ brains rather than as something to use in awing and profound ways.

Now there are a lot of guides out there to help teachers consider the taxonomy in their lesson design.  Some of these guides are great and some are fatally flawed.  However, these guides have not proven adequate for promoting widespread higher order instruction.  Why?  I’m not sure.  Could it be:

• they insufficiently communicate how to design lessons that engage the cogs of the brain at a higher level of Bloom’s
• not enough teachers place a high value on developing this type of instruction
• there isn’t enough time built into a teacher’s day to spend developing curriculum that goes beyond the insipid pre-packaged lessons that come with the big bucks districts spend on textbooks
• for some other reason yet to be discovered?

With all of the efforts being spent on education reform, it might be worth taking a moment to investigate why daily lesson plans do not consistently inspire these higher levels of cognition in students.  It is not the case that there aren’t an extraordinary number of teachers that rise to this high standard, because there certainly are.  It is just not as commonplace as one might hope.  But why?  Especially since Bloom’s is common knowledge among educators.

Bloom’s Taxonomy, however, is not perfect.  It’s imperfection lies in how easy it is to misinterpret and misuse.   Using the various guidelines for the taxonomy, a teacher may believe that they are creating a task that requires higher level thinking that doesn’t.  Or equally ineffective, a teacher may create a task that has a  higher level aspect to the task, but the higher order thinking isn’t focused on the concept and ideas that you hope.  Instead, interaction with the concepts remains at a very low level.  Here are a couple of examples:

Example 1: The pyramid to the left aligns web 2.0 tools with Bloom’s Taxonomy and was tweeted my way recently.  It seems like a good idea because, in theory, now teachers can select a tool based on the desired cognitive complexity of the task.   Wouldn’t it be great if it were that easy?  Then as long as you are using the tool at the appropriate level of Bloom’s, then you are fostering higher order thinking at that level.

But ultimately it makes no sense.  Each of the items listed in the pyramid are simply tools.  Where would paper fall on the chart?  Nowhere!  Because it is not what tool or implement you are using but how you are using it.  Take Prezi for example.  Based on this chart it is a tool that will have your students working in the highest possible cognitive domain – creating.  But if students are just finding images and information on the web and inserting it into a presentation without much processing, then it is far from being a creative enterprise.  Conversely Flickr is placed at the lowest level as a remembering tool.  But suppose that you have students find pictures on Flickr to illustrate the concept of ‘decay’ or ‘affluence’ or ‘democracy’.  An activity like that would at least be at the analysis level of Bloom’s.

Example 2: I really like this site, so I hate to pick on it.  Someone has made this Bloom’s flip book .  On each page there are descriptions, helpful verbs, and sample activities for each level of Bloom’s.  On the ‘Create’ level it suggests an activity where students create a film about a topic.  What’s interesting about this example is that there is no question that creating a movie will have your students working at a higher level of thinking, but not necessarily about the topic of the movie.  The act of writing a script/creating a storyboard and using movie-making software to edit and organize information so that it effectively communicates and visually stimulates certainly requires thinking at every level of Bloom’s.  The problem is that students can create a beautiful movie and not have to think at a higher level about the content at all.  For example, what if you asked students to make a movie about the types of volcanoes.  Students could simply go online, find out the types of volcanoes, copy a definition/description, download a picture of each, and slap a movie together.  I’ve seen students do exactly that.  In order to have students struggle with the concepts at a higher level, it isn’t what they produce but how the task is framed that matters.  A higher order movie task might ask students to pretend that they work for the department of the interior and create a introductory video for developers who want to build communities near a volcano.   Clearly in this case the students will need to grapple with information related to volcanoes much more significantly.

Example 3: Even relying on the verbs that are often listed as correlating to various levels of Bloom’s can lead to mixed results.  The verb ‘decide’ is placed at the evaluation level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.  This makes sense because complex decision-making requires significant thought.  Bernie Dodge has an excellent presentation on the topic of Kids As Deciders (btw – he’s coming up as My Ed Heroes #3 tomorrow).  But a teacher could construct an objective using that verb that does not ask students to think at a higher level.  For example:  ”Students will be able to decide whether an image of a volcano is a cinder cone.”  This objective has a verb that is at the evaluation level, but what students are really doing here is at the understanding or applying level.  The new Bloom’s Taxonomy that places creating at the highest level is sure to lead to misinterpretations.  Whenever the objective is create a…movie, presentation, podcast, etc. and specifies the type of production, you have no guarantee that the task will truly meet any level of Bloom’s beyond understanding.  However, if the task is not tool/product specific and uses the verb create, you are more likely to see better results.  Take the volcano movie above.  If instead you simply asked students to create guidelines for developers who would like to build communities near volcanoes and left the format up to the student, then the creation aspect is squarely placed on the content.

To sum up, I think that Bloom’s Taxonomy is of enormous importance.  If educators truly understand it and strive to create lessons that prod their students to more complex levels of cognition, the employment of the taxonomy would be a great success. But this breakthrough has been around so long and we have still not found a way to utilize the taxonomy effectively, and that is a shame.

Resources (buyer beware – not all of the resources listed at these two sites are created equally, but they are a good start):

Educational Origami’s Bloom’s Taxonomy Resources (and Ed Origami’s Wiki Resources) – I love these

Larry Ferlazzo’s’ Best Resources for Helping Teachers Use Bloom’s Taxonomy