Teach Secondary Issue 13.4

Help your learners BLOSSOM Kit Betts-Masters unpacks the reasons as to why Bloom’s Taxonomy is a classic learning theory that can still spark innovation A sk your class which is the harder task –memorising a list of forces and their definitions, or coming up with a design for a paper glider? Almost always, they’ll pick the memorisation task. Why? Because they conflate ‘time spent’ with ‘difficulty’. It is, in fact, a muchmore demanding thing to design a paper glider. You have to get the dimensions right, choose the materials, consider the aerodynamics. As Leonardo da Vinci or theWright brothers could tell you, it’s far from easy. Kids need to be told that memorising things can take a long time, but that doing so is ultimately easy. It’s a process that works by simple repetition. In contrast, the act of designing requires you to bring into being something which wasn’t there before . This is the central idea of Bloom’s Taxonomy and its application within education – that you can categorise different tasks according to their level of cognitive complexity. Educational goals I love exploring where theories originated from, so that I can better evaluate how practical and relevant they are for application today; so if you’ll indulge me a brief history lesson… Benjamin Bloomwas someone with curriculum reform very much on his mind. In 1956, he led a group of educational psychologists who published their ideas in a framework they called the ‘Taxonomy of Educational Objectives’ It was an attempt at classifying educational goals, in a similar way to how organisms are classified in biological science. The original text covered six major classes: knowledge , comprehension , application , analysis , synthesis and evaluation , which were ordered from simple to complex respectively – though not necessarily presented in order of cognitive difficulty . Even then, Bloom already knew there would be issues with perceiving these educational goals as a strict hierarchy. 45 years later we then saw the emergence of the ‘Revised Taxonomy’ – a modified form of the original classification systemmore directly applicable to the education system. It’s here that we see verbs such as ‘describe’, ‘explain’, ‘compare’ and ‘justify’ being linked to levels in the cognitive pyramid, which continue to act as command words in our assessments to this day. Synthesis versus creation This revised version was set out in the 2001 book A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching and Assessing by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwoh, though beware – you’ll be entering a rabbit hole that goes very deep indeed... As a creative teacher and something of a deep thinker, I’ve always been interested in the relative positions of the top two levels in the original Bloom’s taxonomy compared to the revised version. The latter notably Evaluation Synthesis Analysis Application Comprehension Knowledge Noun Bloom’s Taxonomy 1956 Lower to higher order thinking skills places the act of creativity higher than the process of evaluation. I could write at length about the special place of creativity in cognition, and how it’s largely misrepresented in schools – but not here. Moreover, the original taxonomy’s ‘synthesis’ is replaced with the similar, but really quite different ‘create’. Bringing two things together to make something new is arguably not quite as demanding as bringing something truly innovative into being. It’s also worth noting that ‘remember’ replaces ‘knowledge’ – which gives us a useful insight into how some of the key drivers of current discourse around what constitutes good teaching and learning in classrooms may have first risen to prominence. “AnapplicationofBloom’s has underpinnedvirtuallyall of what I do in schools” 74 teachwire.net/secondary