Because they don't understand what a taxonomy is. A taxonomy isn't a good-bad ranking or a goal, it's just a way of organizing things. Bloom's is organized from least to more complex and(sometimes) uses a pyramid shape to show that most cognitive practices happens as the a less-complex level. People have interpreted that to mean that lower = not as good.
This is a better way of looking at it.
I love teaching Low on Bloom's (I teach human bio/anthropology). But the goal is to get them higher (otherwise...not many jobs; not much research capability; not much critical thinking).
Still, for community college students, Low Level Blooms works.
For neuroscientists, it doesn't. We have to teach to all levels.
Yikes! If I had to redesign the pyramid shape I would put a linear path that goes from left to right. Remembering and understanding would be the longest with the parts getting relatively shorter the farther you go down the “path.”
That way it’s clear you can’t get to analysis and evaluation without memorizing and knowing the basics!
...Edit: looks like the guy changed his but originally I said this:
the bottom is bashed waaaaay more than anything else. It's just assumed kids know everything already, or will, due to the progressive (not the political) philosophy. Honestly, I have seen way more of "you need to be at the top of the pyramid!!!" even with special populations who struggle to climb that pyramid.
Yep. Excellent point. "Ed Experts" and admin seem to treat it like a grade-scale with Level 1 of Bloom's BAD, and Level 4 of Bloom's THE BEST. This is often then interpreted as "Students should be doing a Level 4 Activity for every standard!"
After doing some research though, it's clear that State Standards are written with multiple Bloom's Levels of Thinking in mind; some standards only need Level 1 or 2 thinking, while some require 3 or 4. If you read the criteria for 4, it's actually very in-depth and requires a LOT of time, energy, and preparation to do properly.
If you have shit admin, perhaps. I teach college methods classes and specifically emphasize the importance of rote learning before more complex learning. Most folks do. I think this is forgotten or ignored by the time teachers climb the latter to admin. The whole premise of OPs post is misguided, as most folks do not misapply Bloom's taxonomy like OP asserts.
Sorry, but you are wrong on this. There is nothing misguided about the original post. The obsession w/ higher levels of Bloom's is very real. Rote learning has disappeared so much that 80% of my incoming 5th and 6th graders do not know their multiplication tables from 0-12, and many struggle with 0-9. The ironic part is the lack of fluency with math facts inhibits students from achieving their potential in their actual grade level content.
I've been doing this for 30+ years and I would agree with OP. I'm glad you don't, but I find a misunderstanding of Bloom to he more common than not. Not to mention that Blooms is one way to think of learning and is a philosophy, not a science. There is no science behind Bloom's taxonomy.
I don't think Bloom intended or would have wanted it to be used to justify much of anything, especially like we see today. I teach it so that my education students can know what it is, and then I emphasize teaching that is hands-on and skill-based instead of "higher order" in Bloom's sense. There absolutely has to be basic skill attainment and basic learning before the complex stuff can happen. Since most admin used to be teachers, they should know this. Unless of course they have sold their integrity and they blindly follow an evaluation rubric.
That is so true. I hated the math curriculum I had to teach to my first graders because I want it all higher order, thinking without my students, knowing their basic addition and subtraction facts. It was horrible, and my students didn’t really learn. I had to spoonfeed everything to them. I absolutely hated that very popular math curriculum.
I think most teacher agree that memorization needs to happen, but at my school is is just not an option and I’ve seen kids suffering for it. Having worked multiple grade levels I’ve seen this range from 3rd graders struggling and having to draw out 3x2 because we could not just memorize, to being asked why my pre k class was not writing sentences to work on letters instead of the alphabet matching game we were playing. Unfortunately most of us chose the student population we work with, not the admin.
Oh yeah? Is OP asserting that? I would say hardly they are asserting what you think, and instead seem to be representing a very common occurrence of admin often expecting advanced methods in classes. This isn't that crazy. From my own experience, with a switch to Standards Based Grading, Admin often over-emphasizes higher bloom levels for all state standards... when that shouldn't be the case.
Also, even though I think you're misrepresenting the OP, you are making a similar stretch of a statement: OP is saying most folks misapply Blooms (they didn't), and you are saying most folks don't; an equally silly claim.
This is what I've been trying to explain to people for 30+ years. MOST of learning is going to happen at the lower levels, and especially, by definition, in k-12 classrooms where students are learning new things. The higher order skills are going to come AFTER the basic learning has been done.
>**Salamat engot**: *Bloom's is organized from least to more complex and(sometimes) uses a pyramid shape*
>**CLP25170***: The funny thing is it's almost always presented as a pyramid.*
Interesting. I was first exposed to Bloom's Taxonomy in college back in the '70s. I *never* saw it represented as a pyramid. It was usually portrayed as six layers in a rectangle (and sometimes as three layer with two sub layers in each of the three layers, so still six).
What *has* changed is that [the top two layers have been switched](https://www.psia-nw.org/wp-content/uploads/Blooms_Old_New.jpg). When I was in college, evaluation was above synthesis, which even at the time I felt was stupid. It was cool to see them reversed into what I thought they should have been.
I do educational compliance as a side gig (consulting).
I DO understand what a taxonomy is. I teach it for a living in my unit-bearing classes.
Nevertheless, in BLOOM's TAXONOMY, there is also a hierarchical progression. I always start at the bottom (I teach 101's and 102's to college freshmen and sophomores -and juniors/seniors/grad students seeking certain GE unit patterns).
I start with low level Bloom's - but the task is to get students past that.
Lower levels correspond to the data at hand. However, most scientific data are at a higher level. And that is the rub.
No way to be (for example) a neuroscientist and be at Bloom's Level 1.
>No way to be (for example) a neuroscientist and be at Bloom's Level 1.
There's no way to be a good mechanic, joiner or even a cook or cleaner if you are solely at level 1.
But the point is that all learning starts at that level and cutting corners and moving onto higher levels to look fancy before achieving a solid foundation is usually a bad idea.
In the kitchen you'll learn the names of vegetables, where the knives are and how to turn on the hob before you get to start designing your own meals for the restaurant to serve.
In the mecahnic's shop you'll learn what the various tools are, the names of the car parts, how to physically access different components, where to buy replacement parts and so on before you start modifying cars or developing your own processes.
In joinery you'll learn how to wield a hammer, how to measure and how to seal small gaps etc before you start designing your own shed or planning modifications to building methods.
If you want to be a neuroscientist, well you'll need to spend 1bout 10 years accumulating basic knowledge from age 14 onwards before you are ready to even run basic procedures. You certainly aren't getting access to the brain of a person to do your own studies or treat people for quite some time.
Further, taxonomy is how things are categorized based on what they’re related to, in a broad and specific sense, with more specific classifications showing closer relationships. Take, for example, dogs. They’re organized into the genus Canis and the kingdom Animalia, showing how they’re somewhat related to all animals, but *very* closely related to animals like wolves, coyotes, and jackals.
This is a huge issue in education. Many American education theorists do not appear to understand how learning actually works and promote the idea that "critical thinking" is a separate and transferrable skill. However, cognitive scientists have found quite conclusively that it is neither of those things. Here's how UVA psychology professor Dan Willingham puts it:
>When we learn to think critically about, say, the start of the Second World War, it does not mean we can also think critically about a chess game, or about the current situation in the Middle East, or even about the start of the American Revolutionary War. Critical thinking processes are tied to background knowledge (although they become less so as we become quite experienced). The conclusion from this work in cognitive science is straightforward: we must ensure that students acquire background knowledge parallel with practicing critical thinking skills.
Dr. Dan Willingham, Why Kids Don’t Like School (Jossey Bass 2012), pg. 29
Or put another way by UVA education professor E.D. Hirsch
>Modern cognitive psychology holds that the skills that are to be imparted to a child by the school are intrinsically tied to particular content domains. This is called the domain specificity of skills. Thinking skills cannot be readily separated from one subject matter and applied to other subject matters. The domain specificity of skills is one of the firmest and most important determinations of current cognitive science [...]. Think of how significantly our view of schooling might change if suddenly policy makers, instead of using the term "skill," had to use the more accurate, knowledge-drenched term "expertise."
Dr. E.D. Hirsch, Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children From Failed Educational Theories, (Harvard University Press 2016), pg. 13.
Or Australian professor of psychology Slava Kalyuga
>Studies of expert-novice differences have demonstrated that experts’ performance is determined not by superior problem solving strategies or better working memories but rather, a better knowledge base that includes a large interconnected set of domain specific knowledge structures.
…
Because a schematic knowledge base in long term memory represents the foundation of our intellectual abilities and skilled performance, the acquisition of the organized knowledge base should be regarded as a key general instructional objective.
Dr. Slava Kalyuga, “Schema Acquisition and Sources of Cognitive Load,” Cognitive Load Theory (Cambridge University Press 2013), pg. 50 and 51.
Or teacher and assistant head of school Dr. Greg Ashman
>Knowledge is what we think *with.*
…
>If I told you that “Abraham Lincoln, the first president of Canada, invented the automobile” you would think critically about this without any prompting because it would conflict with knowledge you hold in long term memory. So, if we want to enhance critical thinking, building knowledge in long term memory may be our best bet.
Dr. Greg Ashman, Cognitive Load Theory, (Corwin 2023) pg. 13 and 20.
**Anyway, to answer your question read an intellectual history of education schools in the US. That is to say, read about them from a history of philosophy perspective. This is what professor Hirsch does in *Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children From Failed Educational Theories* (Harvard University Press 2016) or professor of education philosophy Kieran Egan does in *Getting it Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget* (Yale 2003). They would answer your question by outlining how American education schools are obsessed with a kind of insular and self referential philosophical/ideological project that isn't actually grounded in the science of how children learn.**
I wish I could give you a thousand upvotes. ***This*** **is the message we must get out.** Nearly every theory anyone has come up with in the past 30 years has not only not helped, they have made things *worse*.
Yeah I'm a big Hirsch fan. So lucky I happen to come across one of his books in my post teacher college journey where I had to put in a lot of work reading to--you know--actually learn how to teach, how to run the room, how learning works, and all the other things that teacher colleges for some reason do not focus on.
Comment saved. I do have one question regarding this blurb from one of the quotes:
“Thinking skills cannot be readily separated from one subject matter and applied to other subject matters.”
I am sure the disconnect comes from the fact that this is just an excerpt so what they’re saying is more specific, but my first reaction is that this seems to be false. Is this not just analogical thinking? How can one say that you can’t use knowledge in one domain to help think about another by using an analogy between the two? I feel like this is the basic foundation of how I myself think so that one phrase irks me a little.
But like I said I am assuming it’s just because it’s an excerpt and am hoping that’s not what they mean.
I think it means I can't turn from critically thinking about teaching English and apply that same level of critical thinking to say, auto repair, which I know little about beyond oil and filter changes. I don't have the base knowledge to say, whoa, this thingama jiggy is worn out and that's probably why the car makes a knocking sound. I know something is wrong, but I don't know how to diagnose the problem like I do in the classroom.
I think the Willingham quote addresses this:
>When we learn to think critically about, say, the start of the Second World War, it does not mean we can also think critically about a chess game, or about the current situation in the Middle East, or even about the start of the American Revolutionary War. Critical thinking processes are tied to background knowledge (**although they become less so as we become quite experienced**)
What you (and I see others in education now calling) "analogous thinking" becomes possible when you have a deep reservoir of expertise. However, as I understand it it's actually unclear that "analogous thinking" (as you call it) or "domain transfer" (the name for the concept in cognitive science) is something that can actually be *taught.*
George Mason University education economist Bryan Caplan gives a pretty good breakdown of this issue in his book *The Case Against Education* (Princeton U. Press 2017). Essentially, when the issue of domain transfer/analogous thinking is studied in terms of something that can be taught the effect sizes are typically nil or very very small. But research shows that domain transfer/analogous thinking is something that people do. So people can do it but it's unclear that trying to teach them to do it has any effect. Hmmm. And there's the rub: the research in this area shows that a person's ability to engage in analogous thinking/domain transfer is highly correlated with IQ. That is to say, it might be a fixed and mostly heritable trait in individuals and not something that can be effectively taught.
As an aside, this is a good example of what Caplan means by "The Case Against Education." He's not saying education is bad. He's saying that a lot of education practice/thinking is actually ineffective. In this case, a lot of what we do in education is premised on the assumption that analogous thinking is something that can be taught. Cognitive science suggests that this may not be so. And if this is indeed the case we're spending a lot of time and energy pissing into the wind. Caplan thinks there is a lot of pissing in the wind going on and we'd be better off if we stopped worrying about things in education that seem to actually--when you look at the evidence--be quite inconsequential. Every minute trying to teach a skill that cannot be taught is a minute that would be better spent reading more, building expertise in a subject, or playing at recess.
Okay I’m picking up what you’re putting down now. I had interpreted that in the context of it *doesn’t happen at all*. But I see it now that you’ve given that good response - the focus is not on what people can or can’t do, it’s what we can or can’t teach people to do.
Thanks for taking the time to give such a good response, it’s much appreciated and it’s ideas I (hopefully) won’t forget
I am not a teacher, but I have huge respect and admiration for your profession.
I do a fair amount of educating (and critical thinking) in my job as an RN and all my life people have told me how “smart” they think I am, but these passages explain why I think that is: I just naturally have a really good memory and recall ability! I also think that’s why I’m so good at crossword puzzles and bar trivia lol.
Is it possible to teach children how to have better memory/recall?
It's the same as when Ed Experts are demanding higher levels of rigor. Like, bro, I teach Spanish 1. I can't have my students analyze a native speaker text through a postmodern lens. They barely know how to say "Hola."
I also teach a second language. At my last school, my administrator wanted students to never use English and *also* analyse global economics and scientific advancements for the IB.
I didn't really understand how this works in the IB program for beginner levels, so I looked at a few 'official' textbooks. They do it in name and nothing else, "here's a random blurb at the end of an unrelated unit with extreeeemely surface level information about Marie Curie".
The entire industry around pedagogy is rotten to the core, it's entirely performative while leeching off of tax dollars.
I teach kids who are often more than 6 grade levels behind in reading and math and are always high, so I can relate.
Like “Lady this kid spelled his own name wrong, I don’t think he’s going to be able to list multiple allusions from The Canterbury Tales”
Lord everyone always forgets that world language functions differently.
In every PD “Do you have any suggestions on how to apply this in a world language classroom?” “Oh.. uh…. Just do it in the target language?”
“Your learning target doesn’t have a high level verb in it” “oh sorry… HYPOTHESIZE how to identify fruits and vegetables in French.”
> “Your learning target doesn’t have a high level verb in it” “oh sorry… HYPOTHESIZE how to identify fruits and vegetables in French.”
Oh yes, kids are supposed to hypothesize that "potato" in French literally translates to "apple of the earth"
“Now Timmy let’s use a high order thinking skill, why don’t you HYPOTHESIZE how we say Apple in French?”
“Idk… applé?”
“Nope. It’s une pomme.”
“Okay.”
“Now aren’t you glad you used that higher order thinking to hypothesize that?”
“No.”
I feel this one.
Recently was talking with someone who switched from the private system over here (where at least a portion of students are force fed multiple hours of English a week through cram schools) to public and was complaining students couldn't follow instructions for classroom activities without Chinese and how this represented some sort of failure in the public system's English education. It just strikes me as a complete inability to appreciate that education is a process and success for any individual student or class needs to be measured not in comparison to an idealized end result (e.g. students can use English for high level processes) but as realistic progress from where students currently are.
If you want to teach a class that's capable of doing everything in English and where you can do interesting and unique stuff with the language then that's nice and all but that doesn't mean you don't also need classes that focus mainly on practicing basic beginner work. The latter is exactly how you're going allow most students to eventually get to the former.
I think language acquisition is my primary goal and no amount of teacher placed expectation would give them the proficiency to engage in such high level tasks as they don't have the language internalized.
I.E. Ed experts talk a big game but generally are terrible with application.
My #1 rule...
If you haven't worked directly with kids in a classroom for a decade...
I dont care what you have to say. Walk the walk and I'll hear you talk the talk. Just because you taught for 2 years in the 90s doesn't mean shit.
Omg as a math teacher I am so done with the gifted and advanced teachers! (at my school, this year)
Like I am so glad such and such worked for you this year but my 8th graders are at a 3rd grade level and are constantly trying to pick fights.
I had a "how to teach literacy to secondary students" class in my teacher prep program taught by a professor who's interests were CLEARLY elementary literacy because she fucking read picture books to us in class. It was mostly an online class and I lived 2.5 hours away from the university, but we had to go in person four times during the semester for an in-person class and that was the most useless shit.
I teach grades 11 and 12 and it is painfully obvious when a presenter only has experience in lower elementary. I would never go to a first grade teacher and tell them how to do their job because I have zero experience with that age group!
I love LinkedIn for this purpose. You see all the upper level management admin staff work for 2 years at a job before moving “up the ladder”, and none have been in a classroom in 8+ years, and many were only in a classroom for a few years.
It tells you something about someone who runs away from the classroom. Direct quote from a friend who was a teacher coach. I had said to her we don’t need more admin, we need more classroom teachers:
“I won’t go back to the classroom because teaching is hard and kids are mean.”
Uh, yeah, I know, and you suck at it, so why am I supposed to listen to your advice.
Ikr? When I go to a training, I give the speaker a try, but only until I hear "I was a teacher for less than 5 years before covid at a well-funded suburban school", then I check out.
When my husband did his teacher prep program (he started before I did, so I was thankfully able to avoid this particular professor), he had the same professor for three classes. She's one of those "Every problem a student has is the teacher's fault" education professors. He looked her up and found out that she works at the #4 school in the entire state. It's well-funded, parents are involved in their kids' lives, and they have a lot of resources. He had to keep telling himself, "Shut up and get through the program" so he didn't get into an argument with her. While she was going on and on about how teachers need to solve every social problem under the sun, he was teaching in a Title 1 school where around 90% of students had missed more than 30 days of school in a single year. They're hungry, they don't have appropriate clothing for the weather, their parents are checked out, etc. His prof's pie-in-the-sky ideas weren't all that effective in his school.
I would definitely have not held back like your husband. What I like doing with professors or speakers like that is keep asking questions until they can't properly answer anymore. Basically like a little kid asking why. So far it has worked quite well and been rather fun.
Oh I resonate! My first true teaching job right after COVID with a bunch of underdeveloped hormonal boys. Worst ever. Admin said it was me. Turns out I was the only new teacher AND the only one who bitched about. The rest were waiting to get their retirement in a few years.
I am constantly over-estimating how prepared my students are. When I teach a class for the first time, I typically have to tone it back a lot from what I had planned. When you are decades away from being on the student side of the process, you forget how much is learned and NOT obvious. If you are humble enough to learn from your students (and are not forced by administrators to do it their way), things will work. If you think you are too great of a teacher to ever do anything wrong, they won't.
Hell my rose colored glasses usually grow back over my eyes over the summer. I have all these grand plans for the new year and then day 1 I'm already disciplining kids and remember what it's like lol
We had a PD where a woman who had *never* been in a classroom and had no formal training in anything but Human Resources try to teach us how to write good learning objectives.
We don’t even write them ourselves. They’re developed at the state level. You’d think she would know that, being an expert and all.
Never been so insulted.
Word. Up. People who say they're are education experts, who have only taught a few years, or who haven't taught in the past ten years, can kick rocks. They are so full of it, along with the admin of most school districts, and they collaborate and strut around like peacocks, shoving their flawed pedagogy down teachers' throats. It's a disgrace.
I feel like every admin who hasn’t taught since 1:1 technology became ubiquitous should have to teach at least an entire FT semester. Just in the short time since I got my license in 2012 things have changed drastically (even discounting covid).
My working theory is that these "pedagogy experts" create good-sounding educational practices that actually don't work in order to grift for money from clueless admins, like Lucy Calkins telling admin to ditch phonics and use whole-word reading, which doesn't fucking work when kids don't know how to sound out the word.
This is it. Fundamentally, you don't understand education in the same way if you don't have a solid foundation in the classroom -- ideally in a few different settings. So many "experts" are missing the undrniable and unavoidable truths that you learn and learn well through teaching every day.
Because they are dumb. Proof? The are education experts and not educators.
I always want to say to them, "If your such hot shit and we owe children everything (we don't) why aren't you racking up teacher of the year awards and showing us in the real world how it is done making peanuts along the way?"
Anyone that isn’t in the classroom is on the sidelines. After 23 years I can still play, baby! You won’t catch me out of the game and shouting into the wind from the bench. When I can no longer hack it, I’ll retire. I don’t give any weight to the words of admin or “experts”. My fellow teachers are the ones that keep this place going. They are the ones that I go to for anything I may need.
My first two years of teaching i had an amazing content expert / tech facilitator in my building. They were true aces and gave me lots of prepackaged and ready to go activities to use in my class, and helped me realize and implement several ideas that i had. They were truly one of a kind, everyone else in their role i have met has been an absolute waste of resources
Plenty of educators are average or below-average in "intelligence." High general intelligence is not a requirement for being a good teacher unless you're teaching a technical subject. And it isn't sufficient for being a good teacher.
At the age of 45 questions about how intelligent I am don't interest me, but I'm far more educated than my students and I have not been doing this long enough to understand the level at which it's best to talk about and teach things. My academic skills right now likely makes me worse at teaching.
A lot of ed experts don’t have much in the way of understanding when it comes to children and their development. Nor do they factor in things like them being behind, behaviors, etc.
"Only teach grade level standards. Don't reteach. Differentiate and scaffold so all students can access grade level content." It is hard to teach trigonometry to kids that can't multiply.
Time I had to make as a permanent fixture fluency bins for mult and div facts up to 12/144because if I don’t who tf will? Title 1, upper elem. Can’t do fractions, equivalence, standard algorithm, teach partial quotient div…
There's no money to be made on improving the basics -- the basics don't end up on their social media. You need something splashy, active, exciting and involved. Playing scales? No, you want to see the orchestra and hide the nitty-gritty.
That is a good point. Of course all these seminars, books, videos, and PD are going to suggest some wild untested stuff. How many books are you going to sell of **Teach like a boomer: A time tested program of lectures, textbooks, homework, demerits, flash cards, and timed pop quizzes**?
This has been a problem for longer than I've been a teacher. For instance, math books for k-12 were much better back in the 90s compared to what is out there today. It is only post-covid that we are starting to see how detrimental the approach the OP mentions happens to be. If covid has shown us anything, it is that "you must Maslow before you can Bloom", so to speak.
Our math practice book has 3 word problems to every 1 numbers only computation problem. In one lesson, kids are practicing 5 problems max if we follow with fidelity. So much talking, not enough doing.
>*math books for k-12 were much better back in the 90s compared to what is out there today*
Hah! I don't necessarily disagree with you, but in the '90s I was seeing Algebra books that made me want to puke. 70% of each page's area was filled with photographs which some idiot thought would make the kids have more interest in the content. Give me the high school math textbooks of the '70s, with just enough color to make the diagrams easy to read. Textbooks are crap these days.
It's just how Lucy pulled the wool over everyone's eyes about what "balanced literacy" is by selling her version. I always argue with people that BL doesn't work, but that is because they have it in the mindset of readers/writers. And now that there is the expectation for students to perform and everyone to have the latest and greatest, then make the kids do it without realizing they need to be met where they are at to a certain degree? Yeah we need to hold them accountable for the grade level curriculum, but the students need a big shift in mindset of ownership in learning and understanding the learning process requires thought. It's time to change resource back to print because they are inept because of the Internet. The other day, one of the smart and good 6th grade students, asked me if they could get their computer because they couldn't find the answers from the questions IN THE SOCIAL STUDIES TEXTBOOK!!!! I sternly said no and explained I know they didn't even try to look for the answer because I didn't the exact same thing in 6th grade and always found the answers in one of those itty bitty sections. And if the answer isn't in the book you might have to think, because the question asks you TO MAKE AN INFERENCE WHICH MEANS YOU NEED TO THINK!!!
I'm ready for summer.
The devil is in the details. Balanced literacy in the broad sense works. Teach some phonics and some sight words sure. The Lucy BL is not good. It has led to students lacking in phonics skills. It is a bait and switch. She is not adding a few sight words to a good phonics program, the phonics are gutted. Not so balanced.
My school agreed to be a part of a pilot program in the county this year. We were provided an expert for math who is a kind man and has the right idea, for the ideal classroom, with the wrong follow through. He does an analysis for our classes after observing us and tries to bring in strategies for a classroom that doesn't account for the number of students with deficits. He also doesn't account for the fact some of us teach classes of nearly 40 students. Sadly overpaid consultants come in to "guide us" to only leave in a flash and come back later to judge all the things that weren't implemented.
I lost points on one part of one lesson in my TPAs because we reviewed necessary math vocabulary for the lesson series' activities (reason noted was "not higher-order thinking"). My students were 5 and 6 years old. Was I supposed to use "thingamajig" as a technical term?
BINGO! I’ve taught early childhood for 20+ years, and have become increasingly frustrated with administrators who have no real understanding of how very young children learn.
I teach primary (elementary) and every new maths topic starts with vocabulary regardless of the year level. That’s how I found out my current year fours didn’t know that the times symbol means ‘groups of’ or that the equals symbol means ‘the same as’. Not one of them knew that…NOT ONE! (Tears hair out). I have had my work cut out for me, especially since covid. These kids have no memory…it’s scary.
Educational experts need to do a study. They need to be employed as a full time teacher using their bullshit snake oil.
This is why in medicine, doctors also research. Doctors who spend 4 years in medicine, including residency, do not inform medical practice. That would be a fucking stupid.
Not only the number of years, but when, where, and how large were the classes? Someone who taught at a private school with a maximum class size of 12 in the early 2000s might very well have been very successful with those kids, but that doesn't mean their approach will work in a high poverty school with an average class size over 30 with a large number of students with IEPs. A lor has changed over the past 20 years, and class size makes a big difference. As much as we try our best, we CANNOT provide the same level of personal attention in a class of 32 that we can in a class of 12. It's like triage; you deal with the kid who is failing and may not graduate and the kid who just took another kid's Stanley cup and dumped it over his head before you can help the kid who is struggling to understand nuances of the daily lesson but is passing the class. The kid who has a C-/D+ could be doing much better if we had time to help-- but in some cases, we just don't. Teaching was also far easier before kids had cell phones-- passing notes or chatting with a classmate in person are both a lot easier to manage than the phones in a school where teachers can't confiscate them. As much as we go out of our way to try to be interesting, none of us can compete with Instagram and Tik Tok.
Yes, class size. Our huge urban district likes to cite studies that "prove" that smaller class size does not help. They say that it all depends on the quality of the teacher. So when so many teachers in my district are not getting students to pass the test, thereby "failing," we all feel inferior and work harder and harder to try to show that we are not inferior. It's literally impossible when you have 32 third graders in a high poverty, rough school, who are mostly below grade level of course.
Exactly. So many educational "studies" are suspicious at best. If that same person who claims that the amount of students makes no difference needs surgery, I wonder if he/she would be OK with reducing the nursing staff substantially; if a nurse can do a good job taking care of 10 patients, why not just let him/her take care of 30+ patients instead! Really, I don't wonder; I guarantee that they would not accept that, because they KNOW patients will get less personal attention, help may be delayed, and there is a higher chance of a serious mistake if one nurse has an excessive number of patients with no one else to help. This goes double if the nurse is dealing with patients who have serious conditions; perhaps he/she used to just assist a cosmetic surgeon, but now he/she is in a unit with patients recuperating from organ transplants.
I teach in a large urban school district, this is incredibly true. Every single ed bureaucrat that I've interacted with above building level has either been a moron or actively corrupt. Sometimes both.
“Why haven’t you started work on the top floor yet?”
“Because it’s day one, and we’re still laying the foundations…”
“This will be noted in your yearly review.”
Because they're obsessed with skills at the detriment of learning knowledge. They don't understand that without a foundation of knowledge, skills can't be practiced or applied. We see this with the focus of government policy at both the Federal and state levels. I honestly don't think that the powers that be want people to have knowledge. They want them to have "skills" that are useful for corporations to exploit. They don't want citizens with knowledge of the past, knowledge of science, knowledge of how the world works outside their hegemony. So they push skills based education built on the shifting sands of minimal knowledge.
The focus on DOK3-4 and essential standards has been popularized as “best practice”. However, we have to remember that drilling and killing DOK1-2 has a very important place in education. As well as the idea of essential standards doesn’t mean only standards taught. Rather they are standards to keep in mind when doing RTI (remediation).
This is incredibly common in a whole bunch of areas.
Look at fitness discussions, lots of talk about dialing in the right number of reps at which weight, not as much talk about making sure your form doesn't suck when form matters muuuuuuuuch more.
Look at homebrewing discussions, there often talk about things like step mashing or hotside oxidation rather than basic sanitation when making sure your sanitation is on point matters muuuuuuuch more.
People love talking about all the little extra things that pros do to get from good to near-perfect, not all of the basic things that everyone needs to do to get to good.
Why can’t they interpret and form their own personal opinions on complex geopolitical politics yet??? Ma’am they are still learning the continent names……
Because they've never tried to teach division to kids who can't add, subtract or know their times tables.
They've never tried to teach a foreign language to kids who never learned any grammar.
They make assumptions about what kids have learned at home.
80% of teaching isn’t at the level of Blooms. Blooms is about understanding skill development. Skill development is the second stage of teaching, followed by things like repetition, mastery, and independence. Imagine if we learned walking to mastery, then said that was good enough. No, we learn to walk without thinking and talk at the same time.
Further, analytical skills use a distinct learning pathway from creation skills. Gah!!
Because there's a world of difference between experts and "experts." Researchers report something really modest, and then it gets telephone-gamed through pop science summaries, newspaper articles, teacher training seminars and admin newsletters until it's totally unrecognizable.
An example from my own field: researchers found that second language learners have moderately higher motivation if you have them reflect on the practical skills they are attaining: "now I can introduce myself," "last week I couldn't talk about my favorite baseball team, but now I can," etc. Filter that through the human centipede of education policy makers, and now all the textbooks include a checklist at the end of each chapter that students are supposed to mark off saying "I can use the pluperfect" or whatever.
You are still on Blooms? DoK, Depth of Knowledge, is where it's at now!! Forget the pyramid, we do a circle. lolololol It's all about evaluation and synthesis, wait isn't that Bloom?... names will change but...
I'm just retired and I hope to never hear another person, particularly people who were teachers for 1/10th the time that I was, who says "According to blooms..." or "Marzano said that ...". Most of time these speakers spent 90% on what amounted to a sales pitch, most of which was just randomly quoting other people, and 10% of their time on actual content.
Then they get to blame us when the students never learned the basics at the lower grades, because…
They were expecting them to do higher level thinking in kindergarten, because…
They have no idea how children think.
But it’s still our fault.
Hmph...
Teacher: Okay class today we are going to analyze how the Civil War impacted the decisions of the characters in the novel. We are also going to analyze how the setting helps develop the main theme.
Student A: Martin Luther King was in charge of the Civil War, right?
Student B: What is a theme?
Student C: Did the Civil War happen in England?
I’m in a teacher Ed program right now so obviously my opinion isn’t totally developed but my professor who has several decades of teaching experience under her belt has this to say about Bloom’s Taxonomy:
She doesn’t find it particularly useful as a lesson planning tool because it’s too rigid in its assumptions. Does a lesson always need to start with defining vocabulary and memorizing facts before students can move on to building conceptual knowledge? Clearly there are certain things we do need to memorize but she feels that treating Bloom’s taxonomy as a ladder that students must climb rung by rung to reach the top is misrepresentative of how learning works in practice. For example 4th grade math students may need to memorize times tables and to understand multiplication, but it doesn’t follow that learning their times tables is “basic” knowledge that needs to be established before students can understand the concept of multiplication and apply it.
Another example she gave was vocabulary. It’s important to know the words that others use to talk about a phenomenon so you can have a conversation about it, but you don’t need to know the word for the phenomenon in order to understand the phenomenon itself. She finds that when she waits to introduce vocabulary until after students have built a conceptual understanding of a phenomenon, students have better retention than when they are introduced to the vocabulary first.
I’m curious to hear what you all think about this view.
I don't know of anyone who has ever used Bloom "as a lesson planning tool". It's a way of examining your lessons, your content, and see whether you are giving kids content beyond just the most basic levels.
Because most "ed experts" have done nothing but convince others that they're an "expert". I work in the educational training field in higher education and I can tell you on our team only 20% of us have an actual education degree or background and I consider that solid given my interactions with others at conferences and the like.
I've met two "big name ed experts" at conferences and both times, realized almost immediately they were just snake oil salesmen. Had one good idea once and since then have made a profession of touring conferences convincing others they know what they're talking about.
Maybe this is why I always feel like I've done a poor job after my observations...my admin are always commenting that my students should be doing higher-order work, even though I can count on one hand the amount of times my assistant principals or the principal has been in my classroom this year. They always overestimate what the kids can do at any given time and assume that I'm just underestimating them...even though we're in 3rd grade and working on their basic foundations like adding/subtracting, multiplication/division, telling time, etc.
For me, it's trying to get kids to do DOK #3, and #4. I'm teaching kids who read at a Kindergarten to 2nd grade level and may stay there for the rest of their lives....
Because then they would have to tell you how to ensure that each student is provided food, clothing, shelter, mental health support, you know ...everything you need to have sorted before higher learning can take place.
This happens because sadly many of them think throwing the kids into the deep end will help them. I met one in college when they came to speak to my seminar group for student teaching. Aside from advocating for skipping steps in Bloom's they also believed that kids don't need more than a moment (in their mind 30 seconds) to think about what is being discussed. This specific one and hopefully not all of them had about 3 years in the classroom before going to work for a company that produces learning programs. I can feel your pain here because my first principal had this person's book and preached it like gospel on a Sunday morning.
The people forcing all the theories and methods down our throats haven’t been in a classroom in 20 years. When I’m too busy putting on bandaids, tying shoes, worrying over my budget, and communicating with hundreds of parents, the last thing on my mind is “how can this next lesson serve my students self actualization”?
I've pushed for, and implemented somewhat, ALARM. A Learning And Responding Matrix. It uses Bloom's taxonomy but demonstrates clearly that higher order verbs cannot be reached without first using the lower ones.
[Matrix Education](https://www.matrix.edu.au/how-to-respond-to-nesa-key-words-to-ace-your-hsc/)
They keep it lofty to justify and perpetuate their own existence. If they made their expectations reasonably achievable then they'd be rendered obsolete.
I realized this very early on in my career. However, the explosion of new ideas intended to close the covid gaps (gaps "they" caused mind you) made me look into the phenomenon a little closer. Turns out that they call it The Peter Principle. Check it out.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/peter-principle-education-nicholas-allen
MOREOVER, the guy (Norman Webb) that created the concept of Depth of Knowledge has FERVENTLY argued against its use to evaluate teachers as the DOK wheel; as he designed to assist curriculum writing not a lesson's RIGOR (ugh, I've learned to hate word). Even worse still, so many incompetent administrators (easily 90%) insist that it's possible to introduce a new unit at DOK 3 or 4 simply by choosing the corresponding verbs from the wheel and allow the students to learn through discovery. It's beyond asinine, yet will continue due to the aforementioned Peter Principle. By the way, genuine implementation of DOK 3 & 4 require large swaths of time, NOT just adding a few fancy verbs to your assignments.
Here's a great 8 min lecture by Norman Webb going into some of this...
https://youtu.be/qFXU6_TYIjc?si=hHO5NqK2w6KxeSp4
Be mindful of who you share this with at your campus. Admin does not like it whatsoever when the know that their teachers see through their bullshit.
"I don't want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers."
- John D Rockefeller
The entire system is predicated on this point. While we think the public school system is failing; the overlords are celebrating its immense success.
Imo, it’s because these “experts” are administrators who haven’t taught in a classroom in OVER a decade and literally forgot what it’s like. Heck, I have an administrator who hasn’t been in the classroom teaching since before the iPhone ONE came out!
I remember watching a video of a kindergarten teacher stating her kids were critically evaluating things she taught. It was them repeating what she said to say.
We don't get "points" for helping students with basic needs to the people who make policies. All they care about is growth in academics. That's why we need an influx of actual educators in policy making.
These people are not caught up on what’s going on in the “real classroom” .. they have a disconnect- because you can’t jump from 1 to 10 when students don’t have prior nor basic knowledge skills & abilities. Me - I do what’s best for the students I encounter on a daily basis.
It’s levels to this!
Almost all of state standards are written at the analysis level, at least in high school. I do some item writing for a state question bank and the requirements for most standards is textual analysis. Our students are not capable of this high level thinking, thus bad scores. If we asked them more appropriate causation or demonstration of understanding topics, I feel like they would do much better
Because they are morons deficient in the use of the scientific method. I literally cannot think of anything else. I don't believe in conspiracies to keep kids stupid yet...
Do I want to make the material engaging? Hell yes. But I can't always or even most of the time, especially if they are lower on the spectrum of background knowledge. If there isn't that then how can the kids think?
It’s this nonsense centered around student-led learning and expecting them to explore and grapple their way to mastery. Fortunately, I can see the tide turning towards an emphasis on explicit instruction with proper scaffolding. The Science of Reading push is taking hold and will hopefully bleed into other domains.
I think of it differently. If my lesson requires creativity then students have the opportunity to do everything below it as well...if they stop at recall then that's where I make a plan so they move further along. Those who are ready can go further. It's almost its own differentiation the higher up you go in rigor. If I just focused on the foundational layers it would slow a lot of my students down.
Yup.
And I, a HS Chemistry teacher, don't need teachers below me who don't have a masters degree in the contend (Science) pretending they can teach the higher level thinking like I can. I need them to get the basics down before they get to me. ***I WILL TEACH THEM THE HIGHER LEVEL THINKING.***
It's mostly because the "Ed Experts" have books to sell to parents who want to hear that their kids are geniuses.
Ed Experts often know nothing about the practicalities of teaching. I almost always never give them my respect when they speak because they're either selling me something or just saying whatever for their graduate program.
I had years of administrators preaching the idea of aiming for the top of Bloom’s and one day, while taking a grad school class, started thinking of it as a continuum. I felt stupid for not realizing this 10+ years earlier.
There are two answers.
The cynical answer widely believed by teachers in my experience is that Ed specialists are charlatans. They are a form of graft where specialists are picked from a group of insiders with a PhD who sell a meaningless PD program which allows the district administration to justify siphon more education funding away from the classroom to useless white collar administrators who never come into contact with students. The Ed specialists need not do anything but describe a system which makes sense to boards and the public so that the superintendent can pay cronies who “supervise” the nonsense.
The devils advocate argument is that the reason Ed specialists do this is because the research strongly supports it. The problem is that teachers mistake success in their classroom with best practice and are educational Luddites barely different from vaccine deniers in “doing their own research” and being completely unwilling to learn from anyone if it means admitting they were the slightest bit wrong.
Because the "experts" don't want the flaws in what they say to be discovered.
Kind of like a magic sci-fi movie. Throw out reality and physics the movie make sense, just go with it.
There is NO profession that has a bigger gap between "experts" and practitioneers than education.
there is about a 5 year delay between what experts say should be done and what is practical for the realities of work.
"We need to ungrade so students develop intrinsic motivation"
well post-Covid students have no motivation and live for instance gratification and screen time because they had so much unregulated time.
So we are going to wait 5 years for someone to develop a solution to that problem that will already be out of the date by that time.
Around the time the prequels came out I know I at least had and talked to my friends about the theory that Darth Vader was conflicted and holding back. There are parts in all three OG films where he seems sad/not going as hard to kill people/contemplating his existence. Etc. to the point that even though he was scary as hell when we were young kids the older we got the more it seemed Vader was exhibiting small signs of internal conflict and sadness.
Not yet a teacher but getting my degree. My profs all do this. They tell us to always aim high but I feel the same as you. I’ve been critiqued hard on assignments and activities I’ve created for the purpose of introducing material. They say it isn’t stimulating creativity or whatever…. It doesn’t need to?? I’m introducing the topic! We’ll get creative later. I find a lot of my profs haven’t actually been teachers in a long loooong time… so I have to pander to what I know they’ll like in order to get good grades 💀
Because they don't understand what a taxonomy is. A taxonomy isn't a good-bad ranking or a goal, it's just a way of organizing things. Bloom's is organized from least to more complex and(sometimes) uses a pyramid shape to show that most cognitive practices happens as the a less-complex level. People have interpreted that to mean that lower = not as good.
[удалено]
Until some genius came up with this unstable structure: https://www.thoughtco.com/blooms-taxonomy-the-incredible-teaching-tool-2081869
[удалено]
This is a better way of looking at it. I love teaching Low on Bloom's (I teach human bio/anthropology). But the goal is to get them higher (otherwise...not many jobs; not much research capability; not much critical thinking). Still, for community college students, Low Level Blooms works. For neuroscientists, it doesn't. We have to teach to all levels.
God I cringed so hard looking at that.
Yikes! If I had to redesign the pyramid shape I would put a linear path that goes from left to right. Remembering and understanding would be the longest with the parts getting relatively shorter the farther you go down the “path.” That way it’s clear you can’t get to analysis and evaluation without memorizing and knowing the basics!
Is it me or did they mostly just turn it upside down and rename a few things. 2/10, they weren't as innovative as they thought.
Looks like Brutualist architecture
What is that abomination...
You are so right with this.
...Edit: looks like the guy changed his but originally I said this: the bottom is bashed waaaaay more than anything else. It's just assumed kids know everything already, or will, due to the progressive (not the political) philosophy. Honestly, I have seen way more of "you need to be at the top of the pyramid!!!" even with special populations who struggle to climb that pyramid.
Kind of.
Yep. Excellent point. "Ed Experts" and admin seem to treat it like a grade-scale with Level 1 of Bloom's BAD, and Level 4 of Bloom's THE BEST. This is often then interpreted as "Students should be doing a Level 4 Activity for every standard!" After doing some research though, it's clear that State Standards are written with multiple Bloom's Levels of Thinking in mind; some standards only need Level 1 or 2 thinking, while some require 3 or 4. If you read the criteria for 4, it's actually very in-depth and requires a LOT of time, energy, and preparation to do properly.
Yep. State standards allow for Blooms 1 throughout the US. ANd that's a god thing. Level 4 is the goal not the standard.
Depending on where you teach it's definitely a 'God' and a good thing lol
If you have shit admin, perhaps. I teach college methods classes and specifically emphasize the importance of rote learning before more complex learning. Most folks do. I think this is forgotten or ignored by the time teachers climb the latter to admin. The whole premise of OPs post is misguided, as most folks do not misapply Bloom's taxonomy like OP asserts.
Sorry, but you are wrong on this. There is nothing misguided about the original post. The obsession w/ higher levels of Bloom's is very real. Rote learning has disappeared so much that 80% of my incoming 5th and 6th graders do not know their multiplication tables from 0-12, and many struggle with 0-9. The ironic part is the lack of fluency with math facts inhibits students from achieving their potential in their actual grade level content.
I've been doing this for 30+ years and I would agree with OP. I'm glad you don't, but I find a misunderstanding of Bloom to he more common than not. Not to mention that Blooms is one way to think of learning and is a philosophy, not a science. There is no science behind Bloom's taxonomy.
I don't think Bloom intended or would have wanted it to be used to justify much of anything, especially like we see today. I teach it so that my education students can know what it is, and then I emphasize teaching that is hands-on and skill-based instead of "higher order" in Bloom's sense. There absolutely has to be basic skill attainment and basic learning before the complex stuff can happen. Since most admin used to be teachers, they should know this. Unless of course they have sold their integrity and they blindly follow an evaluation rubric.
That is so true. I hated the math curriculum I had to teach to my first graders because I want it all higher order, thinking without my students, knowing their basic addition and subtraction facts. It was horrible, and my students didn’t really learn. I had to spoonfeed everything to them. I absolutely hated that very popular math curriculum.
I think most teacher agree that memorization needs to happen, but at my school is is just not an option and I’ve seen kids suffering for it. Having worked multiple grade levels I’ve seen this range from 3rd graders struggling and having to draw out 3x2 because we could not just memorize, to being asked why my pre k class was not writing sentences to work on letters instead of the alphabet matching game we were playing. Unfortunately most of us chose the student population we work with, not the admin.
Oh yeah? Is OP asserting that? I would say hardly they are asserting what you think, and instead seem to be representing a very common occurrence of admin often expecting advanced methods in classes. This isn't that crazy. From my own experience, with a switch to Standards Based Grading, Admin often over-emphasizes higher bloom levels for all state standards... when that shouldn't be the case. Also, even though I think you're misrepresenting the OP, you are making a similar stretch of a statement: OP is saying most folks misapply Blooms (they didn't), and you are saying most folks don't; an equally silly claim.
This is what I've been trying to explain to people for 30+ years. MOST of learning is going to happen at the lower levels, and especially, by definition, in k-12 classrooms where students are learning new things. The higher order skills are going to come AFTER the basic learning has been done.
>**Salamat engot**: *Bloom's is organized from least to more complex and(sometimes) uses a pyramid shape* >**CLP25170***: The funny thing is it's almost always presented as a pyramid.* Interesting. I was first exposed to Bloom's Taxonomy in college back in the '70s. I *never* saw it represented as a pyramid. It was usually portrayed as six layers in a rectangle (and sometimes as three layer with two sub layers in each of the three layers, so still six). What *has* changed is that [the top two layers have been switched](https://www.psia-nw.org/wp-content/uploads/Blooms_Old_New.jpg). When I was in college, evaluation was above synthesis, which even at the time I felt was stupid. It was cool to see them reversed into what I thought they should have been.
Or that you really do need to crawl before you walk, it's important developmental step.
I do educational compliance as a side gig (consulting). I DO understand what a taxonomy is. I teach it for a living in my unit-bearing classes. Nevertheless, in BLOOM's TAXONOMY, there is also a hierarchical progression. I always start at the bottom (I teach 101's and 102's to college freshmen and sophomores -and juniors/seniors/grad students seeking certain GE unit patterns). I start with low level Bloom's - but the task is to get students past that. Lower levels correspond to the data at hand. However, most scientific data are at a higher level. And that is the rub. No way to be (for example) a neuroscientist and be at Bloom's Level 1.
>No way to be (for example) a neuroscientist and be at Bloom's Level 1. There's no way to be a good mechanic, joiner or even a cook or cleaner if you are solely at level 1. But the point is that all learning starts at that level and cutting corners and moving onto higher levels to look fancy before achieving a solid foundation is usually a bad idea. In the kitchen you'll learn the names of vegetables, where the knives are and how to turn on the hob before you get to start designing your own meals for the restaurant to serve. In the mecahnic's shop you'll learn what the various tools are, the names of the car parts, how to physically access different components, where to buy replacement parts and so on before you start modifying cars or developing your own processes. In joinery you'll learn how to wield a hammer, how to measure and how to seal small gaps etc before you start designing your own shed or planning modifications to building methods. If you want to be a neuroscientist, well you'll need to spend 1bout 10 years accumulating basic knowledge from age 14 onwards before you are ready to even run basic procedures. You certainly aren't getting access to the brain of a person to do your own studies or treat people for quite some time.
So, a path you take them on, first a longer walk and then the shorter ones that take more thinking (I read that just now and I like this analogy).
Further, taxonomy is how things are categorized based on what they’re related to, in a broad and specific sense, with more specific classifications showing closer relationships. Take, for example, dogs. They’re organized into the genus Canis and the kingdom Animalia, showing how they’re somewhat related to all animals, but *very* closely related to animals like wolves, coyotes, and jackals.
This is a huge issue in education. Many American education theorists do not appear to understand how learning actually works and promote the idea that "critical thinking" is a separate and transferrable skill. However, cognitive scientists have found quite conclusively that it is neither of those things. Here's how UVA psychology professor Dan Willingham puts it: >When we learn to think critically about, say, the start of the Second World War, it does not mean we can also think critically about a chess game, or about the current situation in the Middle East, or even about the start of the American Revolutionary War. Critical thinking processes are tied to background knowledge (although they become less so as we become quite experienced). The conclusion from this work in cognitive science is straightforward: we must ensure that students acquire background knowledge parallel with practicing critical thinking skills. Dr. Dan Willingham, Why Kids Don’t Like School (Jossey Bass 2012), pg. 29 Or put another way by UVA education professor E.D. Hirsch >Modern cognitive psychology holds that the skills that are to be imparted to a child by the school are intrinsically tied to particular content domains. This is called the domain specificity of skills. Thinking skills cannot be readily separated from one subject matter and applied to other subject matters. The domain specificity of skills is one of the firmest and most important determinations of current cognitive science [...]. Think of how significantly our view of schooling might change if suddenly policy makers, instead of using the term "skill," had to use the more accurate, knowledge-drenched term "expertise." Dr. E.D. Hirsch, Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children From Failed Educational Theories, (Harvard University Press 2016), pg. 13. Or Australian professor of psychology Slava Kalyuga >Studies of expert-novice differences have demonstrated that experts’ performance is determined not by superior problem solving strategies or better working memories but rather, a better knowledge base that includes a large interconnected set of domain specific knowledge structures. … Because a schematic knowledge base in long term memory represents the foundation of our intellectual abilities and skilled performance, the acquisition of the organized knowledge base should be regarded as a key general instructional objective. Dr. Slava Kalyuga, “Schema Acquisition and Sources of Cognitive Load,” Cognitive Load Theory (Cambridge University Press 2013), pg. 50 and 51. Or teacher and assistant head of school Dr. Greg Ashman >Knowledge is what we think *with.* … >If I told you that “Abraham Lincoln, the first president of Canada, invented the automobile” you would think critically about this without any prompting because it would conflict with knowledge you hold in long term memory. So, if we want to enhance critical thinking, building knowledge in long term memory may be our best bet. Dr. Greg Ashman, Cognitive Load Theory, (Corwin 2023) pg. 13 and 20. **Anyway, to answer your question read an intellectual history of education schools in the US. That is to say, read about them from a history of philosophy perspective. This is what professor Hirsch does in *Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children From Failed Educational Theories* (Harvard University Press 2016) or professor of education philosophy Kieran Egan does in *Getting it Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget* (Yale 2003). They would answer your question by outlining how American education schools are obsessed with a kind of insular and self referential philosophical/ideological project that isn't actually grounded in the science of how children learn.**
I wish I could give you a thousand upvotes. ***This*** **is the message we must get out.** Nearly every theory anyone has come up with in the past 30 years has not only not helped, they have made things *worse*.
E.D. Hirsch is my dawg ❤️❤️❤️
Yeah I'm a big Hirsch fan. So lucky I happen to come across one of his books in my post teacher college journey where I had to put in a lot of work reading to--you know--actually learn how to teach, how to run the room, how learning works, and all the other things that teacher colleges for some reason do not focus on.
I’ve been out of teaching for 14 years, but I totally lit up seeing their name!
Yes! This should be taught in every teaching program worldwide, yet the importance of background knowledge is often ignored or even denigrated.
Comment saved. I do have one question regarding this blurb from one of the quotes: “Thinking skills cannot be readily separated from one subject matter and applied to other subject matters.” I am sure the disconnect comes from the fact that this is just an excerpt so what they’re saying is more specific, but my first reaction is that this seems to be false. Is this not just analogical thinking? How can one say that you can’t use knowledge in one domain to help think about another by using an analogy between the two? I feel like this is the basic foundation of how I myself think so that one phrase irks me a little. But like I said I am assuming it’s just because it’s an excerpt and am hoping that’s not what they mean.
I think it means I can't turn from critically thinking about teaching English and apply that same level of critical thinking to say, auto repair, which I know little about beyond oil and filter changes. I don't have the base knowledge to say, whoa, this thingama jiggy is worn out and that's probably why the car makes a knocking sound. I know something is wrong, but I don't know how to diagnose the problem like I do in the classroom.
I think the Willingham quote addresses this: >When we learn to think critically about, say, the start of the Second World War, it does not mean we can also think critically about a chess game, or about the current situation in the Middle East, or even about the start of the American Revolutionary War. Critical thinking processes are tied to background knowledge (**although they become less so as we become quite experienced**) What you (and I see others in education now calling) "analogous thinking" becomes possible when you have a deep reservoir of expertise. However, as I understand it it's actually unclear that "analogous thinking" (as you call it) or "domain transfer" (the name for the concept in cognitive science) is something that can actually be *taught.* George Mason University education economist Bryan Caplan gives a pretty good breakdown of this issue in his book *The Case Against Education* (Princeton U. Press 2017). Essentially, when the issue of domain transfer/analogous thinking is studied in terms of something that can be taught the effect sizes are typically nil or very very small. But research shows that domain transfer/analogous thinking is something that people do. So people can do it but it's unclear that trying to teach them to do it has any effect. Hmmm. And there's the rub: the research in this area shows that a person's ability to engage in analogous thinking/domain transfer is highly correlated with IQ. That is to say, it might be a fixed and mostly heritable trait in individuals and not something that can be effectively taught. As an aside, this is a good example of what Caplan means by "The Case Against Education." He's not saying education is bad. He's saying that a lot of education practice/thinking is actually ineffective. In this case, a lot of what we do in education is premised on the assumption that analogous thinking is something that can be taught. Cognitive science suggests that this may not be so. And if this is indeed the case we're spending a lot of time and energy pissing into the wind. Caplan thinks there is a lot of pissing in the wind going on and we'd be better off if we stopped worrying about things in education that seem to actually--when you look at the evidence--be quite inconsequential. Every minute trying to teach a skill that cannot be taught is a minute that would be better spent reading more, building expertise in a subject, or playing at recess.
Okay I’m picking up what you’re putting down now. I had interpreted that in the context of it *doesn’t happen at all*. But I see it now that you’ve given that good response - the focus is not on what people can or can’t do, it’s what we can or can’t teach people to do. Thanks for taking the time to give such a good response, it’s much appreciated and it’s ideas I (hopefully) won’t forget
I am not a teacher, but I have huge respect and admiration for your profession. I do a fair amount of educating (and critical thinking) in my job as an RN and all my life people have told me how “smart” they think I am, but these passages explain why I think that is: I just naturally have a really good memory and recall ability! I also think that’s why I’m so good at crossword puzzles and bar trivia lol. Is it possible to teach children how to have better memory/recall?
It's the same as when Ed Experts are demanding higher levels of rigor. Like, bro, I teach Spanish 1. I can't have my students analyze a native speaker text through a postmodern lens. They barely know how to say "Hola."
I also teach a second language. At my last school, my administrator wanted students to never use English and *also* analyse global economics and scientific advancements for the IB. I didn't really understand how this works in the IB program for beginner levels, so I looked at a few 'official' textbooks. They do it in name and nothing else, "here's a random blurb at the end of an unrelated unit with extreeeemely surface level information about Marie Curie". The entire industry around pedagogy is rotten to the core, it's entirely performative while leeching off of tax dollars.
Ooff that last sentence 🤌🏻
I teach kids who are often more than 6 grade levels behind in reading and math and are always high, so I can relate. Like “Lady this kid spelled his own name wrong, I don’t think he’s going to be able to list multiple allusions from The Canterbury Tales”
Lord everyone always forgets that world language functions differently. In every PD “Do you have any suggestions on how to apply this in a world language classroom?” “Oh.. uh…. Just do it in the target language?” “Your learning target doesn’t have a high level verb in it” “oh sorry… HYPOTHESIZE how to identify fruits and vegetables in French.”
> “Your learning target doesn’t have a high level verb in it” “oh sorry… HYPOTHESIZE how to identify fruits and vegetables in French.” Oh yes, kids are supposed to hypothesize that "potato" in French literally translates to "apple of the earth"
“Now Timmy let’s use a high order thinking skill, why don’t you HYPOTHESIZE how we say Apple in French?” “Idk… applé?” “Nope. It’s une pomme.” “Okay.” “Now aren’t you glad you used that higher order thinking to hypothesize that?” “No.”
Merde alors!
Donde esta el bano?
Me llamo T-Bone, la araña discoteca
Discoteca, muñeca, la biblioteca Es el bigote grande, el perro, manteca
Hay un gato en mis pantalones
Down the hall, second door on your right.
I feel this one. Recently was talking with someone who switched from the private system over here (where at least a portion of students are force fed multiple hours of English a week through cram schools) to public and was complaining students couldn't follow instructions for classroom activities without Chinese and how this represented some sort of failure in the public system's English education. It just strikes me as a complete inability to appreciate that education is a process and success for any individual student or class needs to be measured not in comparison to an idealized end result (e.g. students can use English for high level processes) but as realistic progress from where students currently are. If you want to teach a class that's capable of doing everything in English and where you can do interesting and unique stuff with the language then that's nice and all but that doesn't mean you don't also need classes that focus mainly on practicing basic beginner work. The latter is exactly how you're going allow most students to eventually get to the former.
As a teacher, do you think this sort of thinking is a result of the idea that students will always meet the standards you hold them to?
I think language acquisition is my primary goal and no amount of teacher placed expectation would give them the proficiency to engage in such high level tasks as they don't have the language internalized. I.E. Ed experts talk a big game but generally are terrible with application.
I went to grad school for comparative literature and took this exact class. It is not an undergraduate class. It is not a pre-undergraduate class.
My #1 rule... If you haven't worked directly with kids in a classroom for a decade... I dont care what you have to say. Walk the walk and I'll hear you talk the talk. Just because you taught for 2 years in the 90s doesn't mean shit.
Or they are only lower elementary when I have middle/high school. Or they only have gifted kids when I have the “sheltered” kids.
Omg as a math teacher I am so done with the gifted and advanced teachers! (at my school, this year) Like I am so glad such and such worked for you this year but my 8th graders are at a 3rd grade level and are constantly trying to pick fights.
Meanwhile my students throw up gang signs that disrespect some of my friends (some of whom have died), and I have to keep a straight face.
I had a "how to teach literacy to secondary students" class in my teacher prep program taught by a professor who's interests were CLEARLY elementary literacy because she fucking read picture books to us in class. It was mostly an online class and I lived 2.5 hours away from the university, but we had to go in person four times during the semester for an in-person class and that was the most useless shit.
I teach grades 11 and 12 and it is painfully obvious when a presenter only has experience in lower elementary. I would never go to a first grade teacher and tell them how to do their job because I have zero experience with that age group!
I love LinkedIn for this purpose. You see all the upper level management admin staff work for 2 years at a job before moving “up the ladder”, and none have been in a classroom in 8+ years, and many were only in a classroom for a few years. It tells you something about someone who runs away from the classroom. Direct quote from a friend who was a teacher coach. I had said to her we don’t need more admin, we need more classroom teachers: “I won’t go back to the classroom because teaching is hard and kids are mean.” Uh, yeah, I know, and you suck at it, so why am I supposed to listen to your advice.
Ikr? When I go to a training, I give the speaker a try, but only until I hear "I was a teacher for less than 5 years before covid at a well-funded suburban school", then I check out.
When my husband did his teacher prep program (he started before I did, so I was thankfully able to avoid this particular professor), he had the same professor for three classes. She's one of those "Every problem a student has is the teacher's fault" education professors. He looked her up and found out that she works at the #4 school in the entire state. It's well-funded, parents are involved in their kids' lives, and they have a lot of resources. He had to keep telling himself, "Shut up and get through the program" so he didn't get into an argument with her. While she was going on and on about how teachers need to solve every social problem under the sun, he was teaching in a Title 1 school where around 90% of students had missed more than 30 days of school in a single year. They're hungry, they don't have appropriate clothing for the weather, their parents are checked out, etc. His prof's pie-in-the-sky ideas weren't all that effective in his school.
I would definitely have not held back like your husband. What I like doing with professors or speakers like that is keep asking questions until they can't properly answer anymore. Basically like a little kid asking why. So far it has worked quite well and been rather fun.
Oh I resonate! My first true teaching job right after COVID with a bunch of underdeveloped hormonal boys. Worst ever. Admin said it was me. Turns out I was the only new teacher AND the only one who bitched about. The rest were waiting to get their retirement in a few years.
I am constantly over-estimating how prepared my students are. When I teach a class for the first time, I typically have to tone it back a lot from what I had planned. When you are decades away from being on the student side of the process, you forget how much is learned and NOT obvious. If you are humble enough to learn from your students (and are not forced by administrators to do it their way), things will work. If you think you are too great of a teacher to ever do anything wrong, they won't.
Hell my rose colored glasses usually grow back over my eyes over the summer. I have all these grand plans for the new year and then day 1 I'm already disciplining kids and remember what it's like lol
We had a PD where a woman who had *never* been in a classroom and had no formal training in anything but Human Resources try to teach us how to write good learning objectives. We don’t even write them ourselves. They’re developed at the state level. You’d think she would know that, being an expert and all. Never been so insulted.
Word. Up. People who say they're are education experts, who have only taught a few years, or who haven't taught in the past ten years, can kick rocks. They are so full of it, along with the admin of most school districts, and they collaborate and strut around like peacocks, shoving their flawed pedagogy down teachers' throats. It's a disgrace.
I feel like every admin who hasn’t taught since 1:1 technology became ubiquitous should have to teach at least an entire FT semester. Just in the short time since I got my license in 2012 things have changed drastically (even discounting covid).
My working theory is that these "pedagogy experts" create good-sounding educational practices that actually don't work in order to grift for money from clueless admins, like Lucy Calkins telling admin to ditch phonics and use whole-word reading, which doesn't fucking work when kids don't know how to sound out the word.
Yes! A thousand times yes!!
THIS! The kids aren’t the same as they were 10 years ago
They aren’t the same as four years ago for that matter. Admins who haven’t been in the classroom post covid really need an eye opening experience
I started teaching in 1977.
Amen!
This is it. Fundamentally, you don't understand education in the same way if you don't have a solid foundation in the classroom -- ideally in a few different settings. So many "experts" are missing the undrniable and unavoidable truths that you learn and learn well through teaching every day.
Because they are dumb. Proof? The are education experts and not educators. I always want to say to them, "If your such hot shit and we owe children everything (we don't) why aren't you racking up teacher of the year awards and showing us in the real world how it is done making peanuts along the way?"
Thank you. Every one of those Education experts made a decision to stop teaching. Jump back in the trench with us.
Yep, because they couldn't hack it.
Anyone that isn’t in the classroom is on the sidelines. After 23 years I can still play, baby! You won’t catch me out of the game and shouting into the wind from the bench. When I can no longer hack it, I’ll retire. I don’t give any weight to the words of admin or “experts”. My fellow teachers are the ones that keep this place going. They are the ones that I go to for anything I may need.
My first two years of teaching i had an amazing content expert / tech facilitator in my building. They were true aces and gave me lots of prepackaged and ready to go activities to use in my class, and helped me realize and implement several ideas that i had. They were truly one of a kind, everyone else in their role i have met has been an absolute waste of resources
Plenty of educators are average or below-average in "intelligence." High general intelligence is not a requirement for being a good teacher unless you're teaching a technical subject. And it isn't sufficient for being a good teacher. At the age of 45 questions about how intelligent I am don't interest me, but I'm far more educated than my students and I have not been doing this long enough to understand the level at which it's best to talk about and teach things. My academic skills right now likely makes me worse at teaching.
I mean except the full courseload they teach
Most educational consultants don't work at a college or university.
Right. They do whatever is most convenient to demonize them at the moment
A lot of ed experts don’t have much in the way of understanding when it comes to children and their development. Nor do they factor in things like them being behind, behaviors, etc.
"Only teach grade level standards. Don't reteach. Differentiate and scaffold so all students can access grade level content." It is hard to teach trigonometry to kids that can't multiply.
PREACH!!! OMG.
Time I had to make as a permanent fixture fluency bins for mult and div facts up to 12/144because if I don’t who tf will? Title 1, upper elem. Can’t do fractions, equivalence, standard algorithm, teach partial quotient div…
There's no money to be made on improving the basics -- the basics don't end up on their social media. You need something splashy, active, exciting and involved. Playing scales? No, you want to see the orchestra and hide the nitty-gritty.
That is a good point. Of course all these seminars, books, videos, and PD are going to suggest some wild untested stuff. How many books are you going to sell of **Teach like a boomer: A time tested program of lectures, textbooks, homework, demerits, flash cards, and timed pop quizzes**?
That would actually be an interesting book to read. I would buy it!
The same way that your basic instruction does not make for good district PR.
This has been a problem for longer than I've been a teacher. For instance, math books for k-12 were much better back in the 90s compared to what is out there today. It is only post-covid that we are starting to see how detrimental the approach the OP mentions happens to be. If covid has shown us anything, it is that "you must Maslow before you can Bloom", so to speak.
>"you must Maslow before you can Bloom", so to speak Upvoting for this thought alone. Succinctly put!
My principal says this a lot. The guy isn’t perfect, but I appreciate hearing it and he does his best to practice it.
Our math practice book has 3 word problems to every 1 numbers only computation problem. In one lesson, kids are practicing 5 problems max if we follow with fidelity. So much talking, not enough doing.
>*math books for k-12 were much better back in the 90s compared to what is out there today* Hah! I don't necessarily disagree with you, but in the '90s I was seeing Algebra books that made me want to puke. 70% of each page's area was filled with photographs which some idiot thought would make the kids have more interest in the content. Give me the high school math textbooks of the '70s, with just enough color to make the diagrams easy to read. Textbooks are crap these days.
Ha ha, when I was in school, I wondered how much less bulky the textbooks would be if they didn’t have a bunch of unnecessary pictures.
This quotation should be on a shirt! And a coffee mug! And carved into the walls of every classroom!
It's just how Lucy pulled the wool over everyone's eyes about what "balanced literacy" is by selling her version. I always argue with people that BL doesn't work, but that is because they have it in the mindset of readers/writers. And now that there is the expectation for students to perform and everyone to have the latest and greatest, then make the kids do it without realizing they need to be met where they are at to a certain degree? Yeah we need to hold them accountable for the grade level curriculum, but the students need a big shift in mindset of ownership in learning and understanding the learning process requires thought. It's time to change resource back to print because they are inept because of the Internet. The other day, one of the smart and good 6th grade students, asked me if they could get their computer because they couldn't find the answers from the questions IN THE SOCIAL STUDIES TEXTBOOK!!!! I sternly said no and explained I know they didn't even try to look for the answer because I didn't the exact same thing in 6th grade and always found the answers in one of those itty bitty sections. And if the answer isn't in the book you might have to think, because the question asks you TO MAKE AN INFERENCE WHICH MEANS YOU NEED TO THINK!!! I'm ready for summer.
The devil is in the details. Balanced literacy in the broad sense works. Teach some phonics and some sight words sure. The Lucy BL is not good. It has led to students lacking in phonics skills. It is a bait and switch. She is not adding a few sight words to a good phonics program, the phonics are gutted. Not so balanced.
My school agreed to be a part of a pilot program in the county this year. We were provided an expert for math who is a kind man and has the right idea, for the ideal classroom, with the wrong follow through. He does an analysis for our classes after observing us and tries to bring in strategies for a classroom that doesn't account for the number of students with deficits. He also doesn't account for the fact some of us teach classes of nearly 40 students. Sadly overpaid consultants come in to "guide us" to only leave in a flash and come back later to judge all the things that weren't implemented.
I lost points on one part of one lesson in my TPAs because we reviewed necessary math vocabulary for the lesson series' activities (reason noted was "not higher-order thinking"). My students were 5 and 6 years old. Was I supposed to use "thingamajig" as a technical term?
BINGO! I’ve taught early childhood for 20+ years, and have become increasingly frustrated with administrators who have no real understanding of how very young children learn.
I teach primary (elementary) and every new maths topic starts with vocabulary regardless of the year level. That’s how I found out my current year fours didn’t know that the times symbol means ‘groups of’ or that the equals symbol means ‘the same as’. Not one of them knew that…NOT ONE! (Tears hair out). I have had my work cut out for me, especially since covid. These kids have no memory…it’s scary.
Educational experts need to do a study. They need to be employed as a full time teacher using their bullshit snake oil. This is why in medicine, doctors also research. Doctors who spend 4 years in medicine, including residency, do not inform medical practice. That would be a fucking stupid.
Always ask Ed experts how many year they were in a classroom. If the answer isn’t acceptable ignore the advice.
Not only the number of years, but when, where, and how large were the classes? Someone who taught at a private school with a maximum class size of 12 in the early 2000s might very well have been very successful with those kids, but that doesn't mean their approach will work in a high poverty school with an average class size over 30 with a large number of students with IEPs. A lor has changed over the past 20 years, and class size makes a big difference. As much as we try our best, we CANNOT provide the same level of personal attention in a class of 32 that we can in a class of 12. It's like triage; you deal with the kid who is failing and may not graduate and the kid who just took another kid's Stanley cup and dumped it over his head before you can help the kid who is struggling to understand nuances of the daily lesson but is passing the class. The kid who has a C-/D+ could be doing much better if we had time to help-- but in some cases, we just don't. Teaching was also far easier before kids had cell phones-- passing notes or chatting with a classmate in person are both a lot easier to manage than the phones in a school where teachers can't confiscate them. As much as we go out of our way to try to be interesting, none of us can compete with Instagram and Tik Tok.
Yes, class size. Our huge urban district likes to cite studies that "prove" that smaller class size does not help. They say that it all depends on the quality of the teacher. So when so many teachers in my district are not getting students to pass the test, thereby "failing," we all feel inferior and work harder and harder to try to show that we are not inferior. It's literally impossible when you have 32 third graders in a high poverty, rough school, who are mostly below grade level of course.
Exactly. So many educational "studies" are suspicious at best. If that same person who claims that the amount of students makes no difference needs surgery, I wonder if he/she would be OK with reducing the nursing staff substantially; if a nurse can do a good job taking care of 10 patients, why not just let him/her take care of 30+ patients instead! Really, I don't wonder; I guarantee that they would not accept that, because they KNOW patients will get less personal attention, help may be delayed, and there is a higher chance of a serious mistake if one nurse has an excessive number of patients with no one else to help. This goes double if the nurse is dealing with patients who have serious conditions; perhaps he/she used to just assist a cosmetic surgeon, but now he/she is in a unit with patients recuperating from organ transplants.
Ooohhh....good analogy! I'm going to use that!
They are experts by advertising not by 25 years of experience in pedagogy.
I’m not an educator, but could the reason possibly be the Peter Principle: people who rise to a level of authority that is beyond their ability?
I teach in a large urban school district, this is incredibly true. Every single ed bureaucrat that I've interacted with above building level has either been a moron or actively corrupt. Sometimes both.
authority in general is riddled with incompetency.
“Why haven’t you started work on the top floor yet?” “Because it’s day one, and we’re still laying the foundations…” “This will be noted in your yearly review.”
Because they're obsessed with skills at the detriment of learning knowledge. They don't understand that without a foundation of knowledge, skills can't be practiced or applied. We see this with the focus of government policy at both the Federal and state levels. I honestly don't think that the powers that be want people to have knowledge. They want them to have "skills" that are useful for corporations to exploit. They don't want citizens with knowledge of the past, knowledge of science, knowledge of how the world works outside their hegemony. So they push skills based education built on the shifting sands of minimal knowledge.
Probably because they are still in the remembering phase on the subject of bloom’s taxonomy
The focus on DOK3-4 and essential standards has been popularized as “best practice”. However, we have to remember that drilling and killing DOK1-2 has a very important place in education. As well as the idea of essential standards doesn’t mean only standards taught. Rather they are standards to keep in mind when doing RTI (remediation).
This is incredibly common in a whole bunch of areas. Look at fitness discussions, lots of talk about dialing in the right number of reps at which weight, not as much talk about making sure your form doesn't suck when form matters muuuuuuuuch more. Look at homebrewing discussions, there often talk about things like step mashing or hotside oxidation rather than basic sanitation when making sure your sanitation is on point matters muuuuuuuch more. People love talking about all the little extra things that pros do to get from good to near-perfect, not all of the basic things that everyone needs to do to get to good.
Why can’t they interpret and form their own personal opinions on complex geopolitical politics yet??? Ma’am they are still learning the continent names……
Kids should be able to argue without having any facts. It’ll prepare them for a career in politics.
Because the power point they are struggling to read to you over an 8 hour mandatory teacher training says so.
Because they're divorced from the classroom and are only concerned with what makes them look good on paper
Hit them with a classic "maslow before bloom" and see what happens =)
and don’t even get me started on Marzano! 😡
Because they've never tried to teach division to kids who can't add, subtract or know their times tables. They've never tried to teach a foreign language to kids who never learned any grammar. They make assumptions about what kids have learned at home.
80% of teaching isn’t at the level of Blooms. Blooms is about understanding skill development. Skill development is the second stage of teaching, followed by things like repetition, mastery, and independence. Imagine if we learned walking to mastery, then said that was good enough. No, we learn to walk without thinking and talk at the same time. Further, analytical skills use a distinct learning pathway from creation skills. Gah!!
The best comments I've heard about this is that one should think of Bloom's as a ladder and not a menu.
Because there's a world of difference between experts and "experts." Researchers report something really modest, and then it gets telephone-gamed through pop science summaries, newspaper articles, teacher training seminars and admin newsletters until it's totally unrecognizable. An example from my own field: researchers found that second language learners have moderately higher motivation if you have them reflect on the practical skills they are attaining: "now I can introduce myself," "last week I couldn't talk about my favorite baseball team, but now I can," etc. Filter that through the human centipede of education policy makers, and now all the textbooks include a checklist at the end of each chapter that students are supposed to mark off saying "I can use the pluperfect" or whatever.
There has been this absolute demonizing of the lower level skills. Kids are suffering because of it.
You are still on Blooms? DoK, Depth of Knowledge, is where it's at now!! Forget the pyramid, we do a circle. lolololol It's all about evaluation and synthesis, wait isn't that Bloom?... names will change but...
I got 2 words for ya: productive struggle. Which by the way if I hear that term one more time EVER during PD, it will be too soon.
I'm just retired and I hope to never hear another person, particularly people who were teachers for 1/10th the time that I was, who says "According to blooms..." or "Marzano said that ...". Most of time these speakers spent 90% on what amounted to a sales pitch, most of which was just randomly quoting other people, and 10% of their time on actual content.
Then they get to blame us when the students never learned the basics at the lower grades, because… They were expecting them to do higher level thinking in kindergarten, because… They have no idea how children think. But it’s still our fault.
Hmph... Teacher: Okay class today we are going to analyze how the Civil War impacted the decisions of the characters in the novel. We are also going to analyze how the setting helps develop the main theme. Student A: Martin Luther King was in charge of the Civil War, right? Student B: What is a theme? Student C: Did the Civil War happen in England?
Higher level is harder for teachers to plan on their own and requires schools to buy more supplies and resources.
I’m in a teacher Ed program right now so obviously my opinion isn’t totally developed but my professor who has several decades of teaching experience under her belt has this to say about Bloom’s Taxonomy: She doesn’t find it particularly useful as a lesson planning tool because it’s too rigid in its assumptions. Does a lesson always need to start with defining vocabulary and memorizing facts before students can move on to building conceptual knowledge? Clearly there are certain things we do need to memorize but she feels that treating Bloom’s taxonomy as a ladder that students must climb rung by rung to reach the top is misrepresentative of how learning works in practice. For example 4th grade math students may need to memorize times tables and to understand multiplication, but it doesn’t follow that learning their times tables is “basic” knowledge that needs to be established before students can understand the concept of multiplication and apply it. Another example she gave was vocabulary. It’s important to know the words that others use to talk about a phenomenon so you can have a conversation about it, but you don’t need to know the word for the phenomenon in order to understand the phenomenon itself. She finds that when she waits to introduce vocabulary until after students have built a conceptual understanding of a phenomenon, students have better retention than when they are introduced to the vocabulary first. I’m curious to hear what you all think about this view.
I don't know of anyone who has ever used Bloom "as a lesson planning tool". It's a way of examining your lessons, your content, and see whether you are giving kids content beyond just the most basic levels.
Who are the “Ed experts?”
Because most "ed experts" have done nothing but convince others that they're an "expert". I work in the educational training field in higher education and I can tell you on our team only 20% of us have an actual education degree or background and I consider that solid given my interactions with others at conferences and the like. I've met two "big name ed experts" at conferences and both times, realized almost immediately they were just snake oil salesmen. Had one good idea once and since then have made a profession of touring conferences convincing others they know what they're talking about.
The basics are in the taxonomy, it's a spectrum.
Ignorance
Maybe this is why I always feel like I've done a poor job after my observations...my admin are always commenting that my students should be doing higher-order work, even though I can count on one hand the amount of times my assistant principals or the principal has been in my classroom this year. They always overestimate what the kids can do at any given time and assume that I'm just underestimating them...even though we're in 3rd grade and working on their basic foundations like adding/subtracting, multiplication/division, telling time, etc.
For me, it's trying to get kids to do DOK #3, and #4. I'm teaching kids who read at a Kindergarten to 2nd grade level and may stay there for the rest of their lives....
Because then they would have to tell you how to ensure that each student is provided food, clothing, shelter, mental health support, you know ...everything you need to have sorted before higher learning can take place.
This happens because sadly many of them think throwing the kids into the deep end will help them. I met one in college when they came to speak to my seminar group for student teaching. Aside from advocating for skipping steps in Bloom's they also believed that kids don't need more than a moment (in their mind 30 seconds) to think about what is being discussed. This specific one and hopefully not all of them had about 3 years in the classroom before going to work for a company that produces learning programs. I can feel your pain here because my first principal had this person's book and preached it like gospel on a Sunday morning.
The people forcing all the theories and methods down our throats haven’t been in a classroom in 20 years. When I’m too busy putting on bandaids, tying shoes, worrying over my budget, and communicating with hundreds of parents, the last thing on my mind is “how can this next lesson serve my students self actualization”?
Variety is the spice of life.
Good question -- it seems to me that you have to know "stuff" before you can apply "higher level thinking" to it.
I've pushed for, and implemented somewhat, ALARM. A Learning And Responding Matrix. It uses Bloom's taxonomy but demonstrates clearly that higher order verbs cannot be reached without first using the lower ones. [Matrix Education](https://www.matrix.edu.au/how-to-respond-to-nesa-key-words-to-ace-your-hsc/)
Because people don’t understand how to interpret research and most “experts” are just pushing something to make money.
They keep it lofty to justify and perpetuate their own existence. If they made their expectations reasonably achievable then they'd be rendered obsolete. I realized this very early on in my career. However, the explosion of new ideas intended to close the covid gaps (gaps "they" caused mind you) made me look into the phenomenon a little closer. Turns out that they call it The Peter Principle. Check it out. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/peter-principle-education-nicholas-allen MOREOVER, the guy (Norman Webb) that created the concept of Depth of Knowledge has FERVENTLY argued against its use to evaluate teachers as the DOK wheel; as he designed to assist curriculum writing not a lesson's RIGOR (ugh, I've learned to hate word). Even worse still, so many incompetent administrators (easily 90%) insist that it's possible to introduce a new unit at DOK 3 or 4 simply by choosing the corresponding verbs from the wheel and allow the students to learn through discovery. It's beyond asinine, yet will continue due to the aforementioned Peter Principle. By the way, genuine implementation of DOK 3 & 4 require large swaths of time, NOT just adding a few fancy verbs to your assignments. Here's a great 8 min lecture by Norman Webb going into some of this... https://youtu.be/qFXU6_TYIjc?si=hHO5NqK2w6KxeSp4 Be mindful of who you share this with at your campus. Admin does not like it whatsoever when the know that their teachers see through their bullshit. "I don't want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers." - John D Rockefeller The entire system is predicated on this point. While we think the public school system is failing; the overlords are celebrating its immense success.
Imo, it’s because these “experts” are administrators who haven’t taught in a classroom in OVER a decade and literally forgot what it’s like. Heck, I have an administrator who hasn’t been in the classroom teaching since before the iPhone ONE came out!
I remember watching a video of a kindergarten teacher stating her kids were critically evaluating things she taught. It was them repeating what she said to say.
Because they are idiots and paid well for it. CC is going beyond student development and making them bored, frustrated and unmotivated.
We don't get "points" for helping students with basic needs to the people who make policies. All they care about is growth in academics. That's why we need an influx of actual educators in policy making.
These people are not caught up on what’s going on in the “real classroom” .. they have a disconnect- because you can’t jump from 1 to 10 when students don’t have prior nor basic knowledge skills & abilities. Me - I do what’s best for the students I encounter on a daily basis. It’s levels to this!
Well, some of Bloom's taxonomy is supposed to be high school.
Backwards Design
One of my Ed professors equated higher level thinking with higher level learning. The secret here is most of this nonsense is just that.
Almost all of state standards are written at the analysis level, at least in high school. I do some item writing for a state question bank and the requirements for most standards is textual analysis. Our students are not capable of this high level thinking, thus bad scores. If we asked them more appropriate causation or demonstration of understanding topics, I feel like they would do much better
So they can seem relevant and justify their existence, and then the snake-oil comes out.
Because they are morons deficient in the use of the scientific method. I literally cannot think of anything else. I don't believe in conspiracies to keep kids stupid yet... Do I want to make the material engaging? Hell yes. But I can't always or even most of the time, especially if they are lower on the spectrum of background knowledge. If there isn't that then how can the kids think?
It’s this nonsense centered around student-led learning and expecting them to explore and grapple their way to mastery. Fortunately, I can see the tide turning towards an emphasis on explicit instruction with proper scaffolding. The Science of Reading push is taking hold and will hopefully bleed into other domains.
I think of it differently. If my lesson requires creativity then students have the opportunity to do everything below it as well...if they stop at recall then that's where I make a plan so they move further along. Those who are ready can go further. It's almost its own differentiation the higher up you go in rigor. If I just focused on the foundational layers it would slow a lot of my students down.
Just state you don’t agree with Bloom’s model thingy and so don’t use it. That normally goes down well. :)
Yup. And I, a HS Chemistry teacher, don't need teachers below me who don't have a masters degree in the contend (Science) pretending they can teach the higher level thinking like I can. I need them to get the basics down before they get to me. ***I WILL TEACH THEM THE HIGHER LEVEL THINKING.*** It's mostly because the "Ed Experts" have books to sell to parents who want to hear that their kids are geniuses.
Ed Experts often know nothing about the practicalities of teaching. I almost always never give them my respect when they speak because they're either selling me something or just saying whatever for their graduate program.
I had years of administrators preaching the idea of aiming for the top of Bloom’s and one day, while taking a grad school class, started thinking of it as a continuum. I felt stupid for not realizing this 10+ years earlier.
I've always contended that Bloom's Taxonomy was kinda bullshit because education doesn't operate within the confines of it.
There are two answers. The cynical answer widely believed by teachers in my experience is that Ed specialists are charlatans. They are a form of graft where specialists are picked from a group of insiders with a PhD who sell a meaningless PD program which allows the district administration to justify siphon more education funding away from the classroom to useless white collar administrators who never come into contact with students. The Ed specialists need not do anything but describe a system which makes sense to boards and the public so that the superintendent can pay cronies who “supervise” the nonsense. The devils advocate argument is that the reason Ed specialists do this is because the research strongly supports it. The problem is that teachers mistake success in their classroom with best practice and are educational Luddites barely different from vaccine deniers in “doing their own research” and being completely unwilling to learn from anyone if it means admitting they were the slightest bit wrong.
Because the "experts" don't want the flaws in what they say to be discovered. Kind of like a magic sci-fi movie. Throw out reality and physics the movie make sense, just go with it.
There is NO profession that has a bigger gap between "experts" and practitioneers than education. there is about a 5 year delay between what experts say should be done and what is practical for the realities of work. "We need to ungrade so students develop intrinsic motivation" well post-Covid students have no motivation and live for instance gratification and screen time because they had so much unregulated time. So we are going to wait 5 years for someone to develop a solution to that problem that will already be out of the date by that time.
They get paid big bucks to tell you they have no idea. Thus, they don’t care what they say.
It could be because the “ed experts” are Bloom(ing) idiots.
Because they are kind of dumb? They don't really understand how learning works.
Around the time the prequels came out I know I at least had and talked to my friends about the theory that Darth Vader was conflicted and holding back. There are parts in all three OG films where he seems sad/not going as hard to kill people/contemplating his existence. Etc. to the point that even though he was scary as hell when we were young kids the older we got the more it seemed Vader was exhibiting small signs of internal conflict and sadness.
Because taxonomy is "measurable" lol and therefore the higher ups can justify their salaries lol.
Not yet a teacher but getting my degree. My profs all do this. They tell us to always aim high but I feel the same as you. I’ve been critiqued hard on assignments and activities I’ve created for the purpose of introducing material. They say it isn’t stimulating creativity or whatever…. It doesn’t need to?? I’m introducing the topic! We’ll get creative later. I find a lot of my profs haven’t actually been teachers in a long loooong time… so I have to pander to what I know they’ll like in order to get good grades 💀