The Wisdom of Bloom

Early in my career, I encountered Bloom’s Taxonomy through a specific lens:  The preeminent goal was to ensure that my students were analyzing, evaluating, and creating.  Every lesson was to include those HOTS (higher-order thinking skills), and we were to document them in every lesson plan!

The problem?  It was difficult to cultivate critical thinking in each lesson.  Questions and assignments designed to cultivate HOTS were often met with blank stares, and even my most engaged students conveyed a brief sense of frustration before distracting themselves with off-task behaviors.  No matter what scaffolding I tried, it seemed that the average student submission featured superficial reasoning with little indication of true deep thought and reflection.

Why was I so unsuccessful with this endeavor?

Returning to Bloom’s

One issue was the approach I was taking to Bloom’s. As a young teacher, I often glazed over the Remember and Understand phases of Bloom’s (since they were, in contrast to HOTS, lower-level thinking skills, and who wanted to make their students use those?).  Instead, I quickly tossed some concepts at my students and then set them to work applying their new “knowledge,” assuming they would be successful because they had my notes and assigned texts right there at their fingertips.  I was missing the wisdom of Bloom.

Remembering and understanding, the first components of Bloom’s taxonomy, are key to internalizing information, and internalized information is upstream of manipulating information.  We must know, and really know, basic concepts about a topic before we can meaningfully compare new ideas to it, apply it to new contexts, evaluate ideas against it, synthesize new ideas to elaborate on it, and develop novel ways to create using it.

In other words:  Students cannot reason with information they don’t have in their brains!

Reflections

Back then, I failed to understand the power of  helping my students internalize basic, digestible concepts as a contextual foundation for the complex texts and ideas with which I would ultimately have them wrestle.

In practice, that would have meant extending introductions to our novels and short stories, captivating my students with intellectually enticing anticipatory lessons that guided them to inhabit the world and perspectives of our authors.  It would have included learning and continually retrieving a carefully crafted set of ideas and vocabulary.

My students should have been able to open the first page of a given anchor text with a keen awareness of the social, philosophical, political, and religious issues the author would have been experiencing such that the students would have been prepared to recognize the author’s perspectives on those issues as they bled through the ink on the page.

Did my approach get better over time?  It certainly did!  Learning about the power of establishing and activating background knowledge through retrieval practice revolutionized my teaching and shapes our approach to developing new tools for you to use in the classroom.  But, oh, how I wish I could have had that knowledge back in those early days!

Final Thoughts

Critical thinking is a worthy educational goal and a valuable habit of mind for all people.  It is also inextricably dependent on robust internalized knowledge.  If we are to see our students develop insights that even pique our interests, we MUST ensure that we spend enough time helping them internalize the basic concepts they’ll need to synthesize to do so.

How?  In upcoming blogs, we will explore activities and curricular planning tools suitable for doing just that!