Week 7- Make-up... Bloom

Blogging about Bloom and his seemingly infamous taxonomy of higher cognitive engagement.

• Have you come across this theory before in your educational training?

I believe we touched on this in one or two of my other classes, but I'm sure it's this class that will have me remembering it forever. Honestly, I'm a bit surprised not to have been more familiar with it, considering that it's so useful and important. Though, I suppose most of my classes so far haven't really covered lesson planning...

• Does it help you understand some educational concepts you've never quite grasped?

It helps me organize my explanations for why I want to teach in certain ways. I don't know that it helps me to understand certain concepts, but it certainly helps me to organize and verbalize them.

• How will you apply it in your classroom?

Well, first and foremost, it is a great reference point for any lesson plan. I will compare my lessons to the taxonomy to see what higher levels the lesson addresses. I can then look at the missed levels and see if there is a way to tie in another activity to the lesson that can address those issues. It will also be interesting for me to see how children do at the tasks addressing the different levels. It will be useful to see if some children perform better at the higher levels, and if there is any sort of correlation between how high up the scale a lesson goes and how successful my students are at said lesson.

• Can you make connections between Bloom's and some of the other educational theories you've come across?

Well, I think it's interesting to compare Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to Bloom's Taxonomy. I have to wonder if one didn't influence the other, at least on a basic level. It's almost as though Bloom took to creating a hierarchy of academic needs. First and foremost, we need information. It's the food and water of education... and so on.

Overall, I think it's a wonderful theory to keep in mind. It certainly seems useful, but I don't know that it would be feasible, or even a good idea to try and reach the highest level with all lesson plans. Some things, the multiplication tables, for example, you just have to know. And as far as I can imagine, while there are a few tricks to learning them, they are really just something that must be memorized. It's not until much later in mathematics that you actually get to do anything really creative with... well, math. And I may be wrong.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't make the lessons as fun as we can, more simply that a person, a teacher, only has so much time, and has so many lessons to plan that it would be nigh impossible to really develop every lesson in a school year to that highest level of cognition and learning. Further, students are already engaged in so much, and it seems to me that the work load of the average, at least 6-12th grade, student is increasing exponentially. So I think it would be important to really focus on applying the higher-order learning to those subjects for which it is less of a stretch.

Alright, well, that's all I really have to say about that...
Thanks,
Katie May