What's Wrong With Bloom's Taxonomy?

This week’s article summary is Here's What's Wrong With Bloom's Taxonomy.

When I was in grad school, Bloom’s Taxonomy was all the rage. I still remember for one course having to assign the questions I asked my students during class, on homework assignments, on tests and quizzes to their appropriate taxonomy level: how often did I ask my students to remember, to understand, to apply, to analyze, to evaluate, to create?

As the article below points out, one problem with Bloom’s Taxonomy is that teachers assume that “lower-level” questions don’t challenge students enough and that “higher-level” questions should be the object of a classroom lesson. In my case I asked lots of “deep” questions, even though they exceeded my students’ cognitive and content background levels.

Another negative of Bloom’s Taxonomy is the perception that learning is linear and hierarchical: in order to evaluate, you must first remember; content and knowledge precede creation.

Being in an elementary school, we spend much of our time building our students’ content knowledge, but, as the article explains, learning is messier than Bloom’s pyramid. We typically learn not by moving incrementally from one level to the next; often learning begins with blind experimentation or with creation preceding understanding.

This is an appropriate article for the beginning weeks of  school because it gets to the heart of what we all struggle with as teachers: how much do we lecture and talk and provide content knowledge to kids (a more teacher-directed classroom) and how much do we allow our students more voice and choice in where their interests take them and provide opportunities for them to self-discover (a more student-centered classroom).

The longer I teach, I see how important it is for us to stimulate and foster curiosity, excitement, and passion in our students. Having a classroom that allows for questioning, discovery, and variety, and debate supports knowledge acquisition, application, and all levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Joe

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Almost every educator knows the Bloom's Taxonomy cognitive framework. 

The problem is it presents a false vision of learning. Learning is not a hierarchy or a linear process. Bloom’s Taxonomy gives the mistaken impression that these cognitive processes are discrete, that it's possible to perform one of these skills separately from others. It also gives the mistaken impression that some of these skills are more difficult and more important than others. It can blind us to the integrated process that actually takes place in students' minds as they learn.

I don't assume that Benjamin Bloom intended for us to see these skills as discrete or ranked in importance. I also know that thoughtful educators use this framework to excellent ends--to emphasize that curriculum and instruction must focus in a balanced way on the full range of skills. My premise is that what most of us take away from the taxonomy is the idea that these skills are discrete and hierarchical. That misconception undermines our understanding of teaching and learning, and our work with students.

Doug Lemov recently critiqued Bloom’s Taxonomy with an argument that others have raised in the past. He is concerned that the construction of the pyramid places knowledge/remembering at the bottom of the stack. It is therefore seen as least important, as a "lower-level" process that should be avoided as much as possible to give students more "higher-level" skills. Although one could alternately see the bottom of the pyramid (as Bloom intended) as its foundation--nothing above being possible without a strong base of knowledge--Lemov argues that this is not the way most teachers see it. The framework, he argues, contributes to a national trend to devalue the importance of basic knowledge, which is a serious problem.

I agree with Doug Lemov on all of these points: knowledge matters. There are many learning situations where knowledge/remembering is actually the most important skill. Also, students cannot analyze or evaluate anything if they don't know facts and evidence.

But I also agree with many of the educators who are in the opposite camp, who are pushing for the other skills, beyond remembering, to be a bigger part of instruction. In many classrooms every single question is a "remembering" question, where students are rarely asked to analyze or synthesize, and where fill-in-the-facts worksheets dominate instruction.

The emphasis, for teachers, shouldn't be which cognitive process to choose as the focus of a lesson, or how to move up the pyramid.  Every part of the framework matters. Teachers should instead strive for balance and integration.

My problem with Bloom's Taxonomy is not the same as Doug Lemov's problem with it.  For me, the root problem with the framework is that it does not accurately represent the way that we learn things. We don't start by remembering things, then understand them, then apply them, and move up the pyramid in steps as our capacity grows. Instead, much of the time we build understanding by applying knowledge and by creating things.

When adults set out to learn something new--let's say Spanish, meditation, Adobe Photoshop, or woodworking--we certainly have to learn facts and remember things. But we also quickly realize that we have little understanding until we have actually tried to speak, read, or write Spanish; practice meditation; edit photos; or build a shelf. In other words, we have to apply and create in order to understand. The creation process is where we construct deep understanding.

This is the same for our students. We may "teach" students to write a persuasive essay by having them remember the elements of an essay through a lecture or a rubric. We may assume then that they understand this skill. But I would argue that they have no real understanding of how to write an essay until they have applied their knowledge and created an essay themselves. Additionally, they need to analyze and evaluate the first draft of their essay, and those of their peers, to build an understanding of what represents quality in that genre so that they can revise and improve. Additionally, they need to analyze and evaluate the first draft of their essay, along with models of other essays, to build an understanding of what represents quality in that genre so that they can revise and improve. This integrated, circular, iterative process is how learners build understanding.

I understand that no framework can match real life. Frameworks create artificial categories to help us organize our thinking, and those categories are rarely truly discrete in practice or the only way information can be bundled. Frameworks can be useful anyway. One could argue that Bloom's Taxonomy does more good than harm as a framework, as it reminds us to focus on this range of skills with students.

But over the years, working with thousands of teachers, I have come to believe that Bloom's Taxonomy does more harm than good. It encourages us to organize classroom instruction counter to the way that we actually learn. If we agree that understanding is often built through application and creation, we need to provide opportunities for students to create things (and analyze those creations) much of the time. While they create and analyze, they will build knowledge and understanding. They can begin creating things right at the beginning of a study. They can use their minds and their hands actively in the creation process and analyzing their understanding, individually and collaboratively, all the time.

Whatever careers and life choices our students make, many will soon find themselves in situations where they need to create things (e.g., websites, blueprints, circuit boards, business plans, nursing reports, community campaigns). Much of their learning will take place while they create these things, during the process of research, trial, prototype, critique, and revision. What they learn through this process will send them back to books or other resources, or encourage them to connect with colleagues in order to learn new facts. Learning in life is dynamic, synergistic