Stepping Up with Bloom's Taxonomy
Bloom’s Taxonomy. Depending on who you are, those two words could have elicited any number of reactions. For some folks, this phrase is meaningless if not unfamiliar. For some instructors, Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain is a useful model for making strategic choices about the kinds of questions you ask and the kinds of activities you build into your lessons. But I know a third group. For this group, Bloom’s Taxonomy is the reason you aren’t allowed to use the word “understand” in your objectives anymore. It’s an extra twist in the obstacle course between you and teaching your course. I mainly want to address the experience of this third group. You have been underserved, and Bloom’s Taxonomy, something that has been instrumental to how I run a classroom and design learning activities, is a casualty of that lack of support. So, if you’ll indulge me, I want to do three things. First, I want to examine the logic of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Then, I want to offer some suggestions for how to effectively use Bloom’s in your classroom and in your materials . Finally, I want to look at how not to use Bloom’s and why we end up doing it anyway.
But first… why should you care?
This is an important question. Teachers are bombarded with models, frameworks, and acronyms all the time for how they’re “supposed” to teach. Why does Bloom’s Taxonomy merit your attention when there’s already so much noise? I believe Bloom’s provides a method for evaluating the overall difficulty of your course design to see if it’s appropriately challenging to students. It also helps you during class to more effectively help students who are struggling and push students who are not being challenged by the material. When used well, it gives us a strategy for pivoting when a class responds to what you’re saying with confused silence. But we can get into that later. For now, let’s dig into Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Going Up
Think of something that you’re skilled at doing. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Then, try to break down everything it takes for you to be able to do that voodoo that you do. I’m going to use making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich because I rock at making PB&J (it’s a natural gift). Here’s my list:
I need to know the ingredients of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
I need to know the steps involved in making a PB&J.
I need to be able to actually perform those steps correctly.
Something will likely go wrong if I don’t have all of the above. I need to know the ingredients so I don’t do something reckless like put sardines in my sandwich. If I don’t know the steps, what’s to keep me from trying to scoop peanut butter out of the jar using the bread instead of a knife? And if I do know all of those things but still can’t make a PB&J for some reason, what use is the knowledge? Also, there’s a sequence here. I can’t make the sandwich unless I know what the steps are. The steps don’t make sense unless I know which ingredients I need. This sequencing is the basis of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Quick aside—there are actually three taxonomies that Bloom made. We are only focusing on one called the taxonomy of the cognitive domain. Bloom’s taxonomy presents cognition (I’m going to say learning from here on out for simplicity’s sake) as a necessary chain of increasing complexity.
You’ll often see Bloom’s taxonomy in the shape of a pyramid. Let’s break it down. At the bottom of the pyramid is Remember. Our capacity to think relies on our ability to retain at least some information. This is why Remember is the foundation for our pyramid. It’s where I know all the ingredients and steps required for making PB&J. Understand is the next step up the pyramid. Once you can remember things, you can begin to interpret the things you remember.
To highlight the difference between Remember and Understand, let’s say that I was learning to make PB&J from a French speaker. They give me a list of ingredients and a recipe card with instructions. I diligently memorize everything on those cards and can repeat them on command without error. But I don’t speak a lick of French. Do you think I could make a sandwich? Sure, I’m making the sounds correctly, but that doesn’t guarantee I can translate those sounds into meaningful instructions in my head. There’s a small yet important difference between Remember and Understand, and Apply (the next step) relies on the comprehension that takes place at the Understand level. I know the information, I understand what it means, and now I just need to do it. This is where I finally get to make my sandwich. Apply is where we take our learning and force it to interact with the world around us.
Next is Analyze, which is about breaking down a concept into its components and examining how the components relate to each other. If we wanted to push our sandwich example somewhere silly, I could examine a sandwich and explain how the fact that contains creamy peanut butter changes the texture versus crunchy peanut butter. I could talk about how the flavor changes depending on if you use grape or strawberry jelly. At this point I’m ready to Evaluate, where I make a critical judgment call. For example, I could make the assessment that a peanut butter & strawberry jelly sandwich tastes better than a peanut butter & grape jelly sandwich (this is objectively true, don’t @ me). Create sits at the very top of the taxonomic pyramid. The key point with Create isn’t that you are making a PB&J—remember, we already did that at the Apply level. If we’re operating at the Create level, we are transforming or innovating on the concept in some way. For example, designing a PB&J for people with peanut allergies.
Coming Down
Earlier we said that this model presents learning as a necessary chain where each step requires the previous one. Let’s apply that reasoning here, working our way backwards from the highest level of Create.
If I’m going to Create a new concept or new process, I have to first be able to tell whether or not that new concept or process is actually doing what it’s supposed to do. In other words, I need to be able to Evaluate before I can Create.
My ability to Evaluate depends on me being able to Analyze how it works. I can’t say this or that part is faulty unless I can first identify the individual parts.
Likewise, my ability to Analyze an actual example of a thing relies on me being able to do the thing myself. How could I possibly have an informed opinion about something in the real world if I have never taken what I know and apply it to the real world as well?
But before I can Apply what I know, I… have to know it. I have to Understand what it is I’m supposed to do.
And I can only Understand what I’m supposed to do if I have the capacity to Remember.
We’re spending a lot of time working our way up and down the pyramid now because we’re going to build from here when we start looking at some practical applications (and misapplications) of Bloom’s taxonomy in the context of learning. This way of viewing Bloom’s—as a necessary chain of dependence—transformed the way I engaged with learners and how I structured activities. I believe it’s made me more effective at having meaningful interactions with students. It added clarity to the way I structured lessons and promoted greater achievement. But I’m all out of words. In my next post we’ll look at how to put Bloom’s Taxonomy to use.
