Reflection on Bloom’s Taxonomy

If you’re like me, you heard a great deal, early in your career, about Bloom’s Taxonomy.  We, as beginning teachers, were exhorted to push the quality of dialogue up with students, urging and helping them to think more critically and develop a deeper understanding of events and ideas.  My current reading seems, on the surface, to challenge that notion, particularly for younger elementary students.  It seems that for younger learners, the goals must be quite explicit and the course of instruction directed primarily toward building a broad base of general knowledge about the topic studied.  Deep insights are generally unlikely.

Cognitive research has made clear several characteristics of human learning.  First, we are, by nature, curious beings.  At the same time, our brain is not primarily evolved as a thinking organ.  It’s first job is to take care of tasks which are highly automatic and reflexive.  We possess, relatively, a small amount of working space in out brains to solve major problems.  Consequently, our problem-solving skills develop quite slowly.  To solve a problem which seems quite easy to a trained adult (read teacher) may take quite a bit of both background knowledge about the subject area and sufficient experience with similar problems to see strategies or patterns which lead to a solution.  Bringing a depth of knowledge and experience makes creative thinking more economical.  It’s a wonderful thing about our brain that when we possess such knowledge and experience, we quite often don’t even realize that a time existed when we didn’t have it.  Unfortunately that makes it ever-so possible that we will fail to recognize that our students are not yet prepared to solve problems that we’d call “simple.”

I have said before that I’m an enthusiastic supporter of Accelerated Reader. One of the reasons for my enthusiasm is that it takes advantage of a principal human characteristic:  curiosity.  When students are given the opportunity to select the books they read, even with a modest bit of guidance from the teacher as to both reading level and content, they approach their reading with interest and the confidence that they can understand and enjoy the book that they’ve selected.  In the elementary grades, a heavy diet of “free” reading is a tremendous resource for the acquisition of abundant general knowledge about people and things, the raw material of later problem-solving skill.  While, on the surface, this may seem random, all learning is to a large extent dependent on circumstance and chance.  I’d argue, though, that both the skill and the breadth of background understanding gained by reading will support students in the acquisition of more specific content knowledge dictated by standards or curriculum.  No textbook or “class book”, chosen for a group of grade-level students, can equal the educational impact of a similar amount of effort put into broad reading at a student’s diagnosed level, which is, at that moment, interesting to that student.

On the Move Again

Those who know me, know that I love activity.  A “normal” day for me includes a 7-mile run, 45 minutes at the gym, a 16-mile bike ride, and quite possibly 9 holes of golf - walking.  To say that I’m Type-A about exercise is only to understand that no letters come before “A”.  So, you might imagine the pleasure I felt when, while reading Brain Rules by John Medina, I discovered that it’s our genetic heritage as homo sapiens to move - a lot.  Scientists who study such things say that our early ancestors walked and ran as much as 20 miles daily in search of food.  Exercise is “wired in” to our DNA.  You may wonder where, in an education blog, I’m going with this.

It turns out that scientists who study modern man have discovered that our bodies respond particularly well to exercise.  That’s probably not a huge revelation to you.  For those of you who don’t exercise regularly, you probably know that you “should” and that all manner of healthy outcomes result from regular exercise.  All manner of modern ills, like osteoporosis, arthritis, heart disease, and sleep disorders are cured or diminished by exercise.  What may be less well known, though, is that cognitive abilities are greatly enhanced by exercise.  Seniors who exercise regularly can be shown to not only live into their 90’s, a feat in and of itself, but to be mentally sharper than sedentary adults many years their junior.  It’s even been demonstrated that sedentary individuals who take up an exercise program show measurable improvement in cognitive ability in as little as four months of exercise.

Of particular interest to us as teachers is research that showed that students who were put on an exercise program of 30 minutes of jogging three times a week also showed an improvement in cognitive ability.  Also interesting is that when the program of regular jogging was terminated, students showed a drop-back to previous levels of ability as before they were running.  I must confess that as as classroom teacher, P.E. was not my first priority.  In fact, it was the first thing to go if we had a shortened week.  That may have been a mistake.  I’d be interested to hear what other teachers have done about exercise for their students.  For example, I’m guessing that 15 minutes daily might be easier to schedule and maintain.  How about 20 minutes, 4 times a week?  What about very active games?  What do you think?

Brain Rule #6

John Medina’s Brain Rules is organized into 12 “rules” about how our brains operate.  I find the book to be uneven, but certainly worth the read.  Brain rule # 6 is:

“We don’t pay attention to boring things”

Medina summarizes the chapter thus:

“•  The brains attentional “spotlight” can focus on only one thing at a time:  no multitasking”

• We are better at seeing patterns and abstracting the meaning of an event than we are at recording detail.
• Emotional arousal helps the brain learn.
• Audiences check out after 10 minutes, but you can keep grabbing them back by telling them narratives or creating events rich in emotion.”

Although I found his discussion of multitasking fascinating, especially the time lag that takes place as our brain moves sequentially from one object of attention to another, I’ll leave it for another blog entry.  Suffice it to say, there is an attentional cost, a dangerous one while driving or operating machinery, because we really can’t attend to two things at a time.

The idea that audiences really can’t attend for more than 10 minutes is one should resonate with teachers.  I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that if you observe who is doing the talking in the classroom, you’re seeing who is doing the learning.  It also conjures up recollections of a routine from Power Teaching where after presenting a concept, the teacher commands the students to “teach” the concept to the person next to them and then that person “teaches” the concept back to the first.  That routine raises the level of concern in students and is, I think, “rich in emotion” as Medina recommends.  And, it breaks up that hypnotic spell of continuous teaching.

Accepting the 10-minute rule, and the idea that the brain responds best to patterns, perhaps leads the teacher to a plan for lesson design.  Whatever the teacher wants to accomplish should be broken into 10-minute increments with a clear break between the segments.  It is best to show and tell the class what those segments are at the outset and carefully explain how the segment are related to the “big idea” for that period.  I’m guessing that less would be taught in a standard period, but what is taught would be learned more completely because students would have clear examples and experiences related clearly to the main idea stated at the beginning of the period.  The brain likes organization.

One size fits all...

I continue to be impressed with Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?  I’d like to share something he said that particularly resonated with me:

“Make a list of all the things you ask students to do at home.  Consider which of these things have other tasks embedded in them and ask yourself whether the slower students really know how to do them.”

There was a time when I assigned spelling, Weekly Reader, or math from the day’s lesson as homework.  The return rate on the assignments wasn’t particularly good, and from an assessment standpoint, it was a nightmare.  One can’t tell what a child knows if you have no work to assess.  Mid-career,  I started following the suggested Accelerated Reader (A.R.) reading management program. I supplemented in-class reading with “homework” reading, monitored on their reading logs during the in-class Status of the Class routine.  Almost immediately,  I both increased homework completion geometrically and was able to assess student progress with near-precision. 

It seemed obvious to me that expecting students to read books that were leveled to their ability was motivating and most students exceeded the standard that I assigned.  And I was “tough.”  To earn a “B” for their nightly reading, fourth graders needed to read 40 minutes and have their reading log initialed by their parents.  Less minutes or no initials, lower credit.  It took more that the assigned task, 50 minutes or more,  to earn an “A”, because, to me, an “A” means “exceptional.”  Most of my students earned “A’s” most nights.  I made it my job to supervise scores on every A.R. test taken and make sure that students read widely based on their diagnosed reading levels.  Students were allowed some choice in book selections, but always with parameters which I set for them.

Wellingham tells us that a broad diet of reading builds background knowledge in readers, making them better readers, and likely to perform better in school because they bring more knowledge to their daily tasks. This squares well with the research that Renaissance Learning, the parent of Accelerated Reader, offers to support their program.  It was common for my fourth graders to gain two reading levels in a 180-day school year.  That increase in ability transferred well to other content areas and the all-important standardized testing each spring.  And, thanks to A.R., I never had a stack of homework papers to assess.