Also, I want to kick Marzano in the teeth. Maybe he meant well, but at this point I have seen his materials used (and perhaps misused) so much to micromanage teachers for the worse, and to give teachers busy work, that I hardly care.
I feel like having teacher education programs that teach--and evaluate--both systems is the answer. Bloom and Marzano both offer excellent insight into learning. The problem resides in having administrators who have not been taught these systems thoroughly, the good and the bad of them, then evaluating teachers based on a "placemat" of gotcha questions that don't relate to the learning happening in the classroom. I have been evaluated under Bloom's and Marzano by administrators who understood neither. Once I had an administrator who actually understood both. Theirs was the only evaluation I respected and agreed with.
Peter -- I enjoyed this very much! I've always thought of (and taught) Bloom's as not more than a grab-bag of verbs for instructional designers trying to come up with learning objectives. The suggestion that it could be used to benchmark outcomes on the AQF is patently bizarre (do we only ask masters students to evaluate things? Do we never ask CIV students to create things?)
Hi Miriam. That’s a nice point about the assumptions of how the brain works. As to the SOLO taxonomy, it is quite different, at least in the minds of the authors, but I don’t think these are quite as sequential as suggested by the taxonomy. At its core, I think there is still a strong assumption that the cognitions are hierarchical even if the SOLO is used for a slightly different purpose. I must admit I have used it before as another example of erroneous reasoning.
Oh, there is no "must admit"! I've never been able to use SOLO at all for anything - it doesn't grok for my students (educational design students), and I find trying to locate a type of cognition on it to be a (pejorative) academic exercise that distracts me from the actual design I'm trying to do :)
Looking forward to more of this... do multimedia learning principles next!
"Evaluation (noting the root of the word) involves determining what we ‘value’ about something and using this to construct criteria for evaluation." I jumped and made an exclamation (positive) upon reading this!!! You hit the nail on the head! "Value". And how can grades do this???!!! I don't know if you were thinking it and didn't want to stray for the main topic, but there should be books and articles, and revamping of evaluation systems in education just on the basis of thinking about it in the way you mentioned here.
"Evaluation (noting the root of the word) involves determining what we ‘value’ about something and using this to construct criteria for evaluation." I jumped and made an exclamation (positive) upon reading this!!! You hit the nail on the head! "Value". And how can grades do this???!!! I don't know if you were thinking it and didn't want to stray for the main topic, but there should be books and articles, and revamping of evaluation systems in education just on the basis of thinking about it in the way you mentioned here.
Have you actually read the original work, including the affective as well as cognitive domains? Or the revision made in 2000, that differentiated types of knowledge? I studied educational taxonomies, including Bloom's and Marzano's critiques, extensively in my doctoral work and subsequently. I feel you are being overly simplistic, missing many important aspects of this work.
Bloom did not work from an "assumption that higher order skills such as evaluation are harder than lower order skills like analysis, we should teach first analysis and then evaluation, or first understand before we analyze." This might be your assumption but it is not Bloom's.
The problem you are discussing might be in the simplistic way the taxonomy has been applied - such as the example "I have seen teachers very distressed as they attempt to match a task to a criteria sheet." Don't blame that on Bloom!
Bloom noted that "a particular behavior which is classified in one way at a given time may develop and become integrated with other behaviors to forma more complex behavior which is classified in a different way" (p. 16) which is definitely not a checklist approach.
Anderson, L., Bloom, B. S., Krathwohl, D., & Airasian, P. (2000). Taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: A revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (2nd ed.). New York: Allyn & Bacon, Inc.
Bloom, B., Krathwohl, D., & Masia, B. (1964). Taxonomy of educational objectives: Handbook II: Affective domain. New York: David McKay and Company.
Krathwohl, D., Bloom, B., & Masia, B. B. (1964). Taxonomy of educational objectives: the classification of educational goals Book 2: Affective domain. New York: David McKay and Company.
A couple of years ago the school system I work in decided to create system-wide rubrics for ACARA. I teach English, and for one of the line items the key descriptor for an A was evaluate, B was compare and C was analyse. I don't know who put them together, but I was really tempted to write in and ask just what kind of assessment they were envisaging could be graded with a rubric that suggested only B students should compare.
Although there are literally hundreds of definitions of "Media Literacy" (ML) in play in the field, the most used definition is one that sort of apes Bloom's Taxonomy. Your essay does a nice job of explaining why that's probably not a good idea, ie:
"Moreover, if the A student evaluates and the B student only analyzes, then what is it they were asked to do? Because it certainly wasn’t analyze or evaluate, because then they would be the criteria and the students would be rated on how well they did them!"
IOW, it keeps the task at hand (which ought to involve some kind of value-driven inquiry) at arm's length in favor of some sort of uber-abstract categorizing and hoop jumping. It's just one of the many ways that ML Ed is especially adept at undermining itself.
I'd be interested in a comparison with university teaching. Not only do university teachers receive little or no training, but the various methods used by administrators to monitor them (student evaluations, course objectives and so on) appear to be made up as we go along. Do we know anything about the relative effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of this approach compared to professional training?
Thanks, Peter. I recall my initial teaching years frustratedly trying to shoehorn learning objectives and activities into a ‘lockstep’ progression based on Blooms ( whose poster graced the inside of our Teachers Diary btw). How artificial and illogical it was to ask students ‘understand’ say a poem like Shelley’s Ozymandias, before they analysed it. They couldn’t, in any sense of depth.,They’d have to just understand a part or a layer of the object - ie the narrative plot or they might be asked to give a rough ‘hypothesis’ of meaning.. Some kids might arrive at deeper abstractions or detect the ‘poet’s message’ because they were faster internally making connections and ‘invisibly’ analysing. But for most, analysis was the still the key
Thank you for this call to action, Peter. It can only add weight to the case - made over many years, and by many others, including Ron Ritchhart - for switching to a simpler and better alternative scheme for teaching cognition and metacognition. There is such a scheme - Thinking Moves A - Z. Developed since 2012, initially as a support for facilitators of Philosophy for Children, its wider value and impact became clear well before it was published in 2019. It is now being used to good effect with learners from Early Years upwards, and is better than Bloom by almost any criterion: more comprehensive, more comprehensible, more memorable (literally an A - Z) and more immediately practical for both teachers and learners. If you or anyone else would like to know more, here is the website: www.thinking-moves.com, or contact me at rogersutcliffe@outlook.com.
Thanks, Roger. You won’t recall but we met *many* years ago I think at a PLATO conference in Seattle (or was it VC?). I appreciate the value of the moves. They have long been a favorite resource. My next post will look at an alternative way of thinking about the cognitions explicitly, offering a relationship that I think is more organic and resonates well with the thinking moves. All the best.
This reminds me of an old Frank Smith essay, "How Education Backed the Wrong Horse" (1988, p. 109).
https://archive.org/details/joiningliteracyc0000smit/page/109
Also, I want to kick Marzano in the teeth. Maybe he meant well, but at this point I have seen his materials used (and perhaps misused) so much to micromanage teachers for the worse, and to give teachers busy work, that I hardly care.
Thanks Andrew, I agree. Even on my own university’s website I see both taxonomies misrepresented and suggested strategies that can’t possibly work.
I feel like having teacher education programs that teach--and evaluate--both systems is the answer. Bloom and Marzano both offer excellent insight into learning. The problem resides in having administrators who have not been taught these systems thoroughly, the good and the bad of them, then evaluating teachers based on a "placemat" of gotcha questions that don't relate to the learning happening in the classroom. I have been evaluated under Bloom's and Marzano by administrators who understood neither. Once I had an administrator who actually understood both. Theirs was the only evaluation I respected and agreed with.
Jennifer, classic scenario!
Peter -- I enjoyed this very much! I've always thought of (and taught) Bloom's as not more than a grab-bag of verbs for instructional designers trying to come up with learning objectives. The suggestion that it could be used to benchmark outcomes on the AQF is patently bizarre (do we only ask masters students to evaluate things? Do we never ask CIV students to create things?)
On the harms front, I'm troubled by about claims like this one that "Generative AI Turns Bloom’s Taxonomy Upside-Down" (https://cgscholar.com/community/community_profiles/new-learning/community_updates/234545) as though somehow these technologies are subverting natural laws of the brain -- a miracle! An education revolution!
Would you apply similar critique to SOLO, or do you consider that one quite different?
Hi Miriam. That’s a nice point about the assumptions of how the brain works. As to the SOLO taxonomy, it is quite different, at least in the minds of the authors, but I don’t think these are quite as sequential as suggested by the taxonomy. At its core, I think there is still a strong assumption that the cognitions are hierarchical even if the SOLO is used for a slightly different purpose. I must admit I have used it before as another example of erroneous reasoning.
Oh, there is no "must admit"! I've never been able to use SOLO at all for anything - it doesn't grok for my students (educational design students), and I find trying to locate a type of cognition on it to be a (pejorative) academic exercise that distracts me from the actual design I'm trying to do :)
Looking forward to more of this... do multimedia learning principles next!
"Evaluation (noting the root of the word) involves determining what we ‘value’ about something and using this to construct criteria for evaluation." I jumped and made an exclamation (positive) upon reading this!!! You hit the nail on the head! "Value". And how can grades do this???!!! I don't know if you were thinking it and didn't want to stray for the main topic, but there should be books and articles, and revamping of evaluation systems in education just on the basis of thinking about it in the way you mentioned here.
"Evaluation (noting the root of the word) involves determining what we ‘value’ about something and using this to construct criteria for evaluation." I jumped and made an exclamation (positive) upon reading this!!! You hit the nail on the head! "Value". And how can grades do this???!!! I don't know if you were thinking it and didn't want to stray for the main topic, but there should be books and articles, and revamping of evaluation systems in education just on the basis of thinking about it in the way you mentioned here.
Have you actually read the original work, including the affective as well as cognitive domains? Or the revision made in 2000, that differentiated types of knowledge? I studied educational taxonomies, including Bloom's and Marzano's critiques, extensively in my doctoral work and subsequently. I feel you are being overly simplistic, missing many important aspects of this work.
Bloom did not work from an "assumption that higher order skills such as evaluation are harder than lower order skills like analysis, we should teach first analysis and then evaluation, or first understand before we analyze." This might be your assumption but it is not Bloom's.
The problem you are discussing might be in the simplistic way the taxonomy has been applied - such as the example "I have seen teachers very distressed as they attempt to match a task to a criteria sheet." Don't blame that on Bloom!
Bloom noted that "a particular behavior which is classified in one way at a given time may develop and become integrated with other behaviors to forma more complex behavior which is classified in a different way" (p. 16) which is definitely not a checklist approach.
Anderson, L., Bloom, B. S., Krathwohl, D., & Airasian, P. (2000). Taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: A revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (2nd ed.). New York: Allyn & Bacon, Inc.
Bloom, B., Engelhart, M., Furst, E., Hill, W., & Krathwohl, D. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: Book 1, Cognitive domain. New York: David McKay and Company. (Online here: https://ia800508.us.archive.org/24/items/bloometaltaxonomyofeducationalobjectives/Bloom%20et%20al%20-Taxonomy%20of%20Educational%20Objectives.pdf)
Bloom, B., Krathwohl, D., & Masia, B. (1964). Taxonomy of educational objectives: Handbook II: Affective domain. New York: David McKay and Company.
Krathwohl, D., Bloom, B., & Masia, B. B. (1964). Taxonomy of educational objectives: the classification of educational goals Book 2: Affective domain. New York: David McKay and Company.
A couple of years ago the school system I work in decided to create system-wide rubrics for ACARA. I teach English, and for one of the line items the key descriptor for an A was evaluate, B was compare and C was analyse. I don't know who put them together, but I was really tempted to write in and ask just what kind of assessment they were envisaging could be graded with a rubric that suggested only B students should compare.
Although there are literally hundreds of definitions of "Media Literacy" (ML) in play in the field, the most used definition is one that sort of apes Bloom's Taxonomy. Your essay does a nice job of explaining why that's probably not a good idea, ie:
"Moreover, if the A student evaluates and the B student only analyzes, then what is it they were asked to do? Because it certainly wasn’t analyze or evaluate, because then they would be the criteria and the students would be rated on how well they did them!"
IOW, it keeps the task at hand (which ought to involve some kind of value-driven inquiry) at arm's length in favor of some sort of uber-abstract categorizing and hoop jumping. It's just one of the many ways that ML Ed is especially adept at undermining itself.
I go into it in just about every post on my own Substack. For example: https://markharbinger.substack.com/p/neither-a-toitler-nor-a-follower
Great read. We need to get teacher training programs to change this… it’s how it trickles into the schools the way it has.
I'd be interested in a comparison with university teaching. Not only do university teachers receive little or no training, but the various methods used by administrators to monitor them (student evaluations, course objectives and so on) appear to be made up as we go along. Do we know anything about the relative effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of this approach compared to professional training?
Thanks, Peter. I recall my initial teaching years frustratedly trying to shoehorn learning objectives and activities into a ‘lockstep’ progression based on Blooms ( whose poster graced the inside of our Teachers Diary btw). How artificial and illogical it was to ask students ‘understand’ say a poem like Shelley’s Ozymandias, before they analysed it. They couldn’t, in any sense of depth.,They’d have to just understand a part or a layer of the object - ie the narrative plot or they might be asked to give a rough ‘hypothesis’ of meaning.. Some kids might arrive at deeper abstractions or detect the ‘poet’s message’ because they were faster internally making connections and ‘invisibly’ analysing. But for most, analysis was the still the key
Thanks, Kate. That’s a wonderful example!
Thank you for this call to action, Peter. It can only add weight to the case - made over many years, and by many others, including Ron Ritchhart - for switching to a simpler and better alternative scheme for teaching cognition and metacognition. There is such a scheme - Thinking Moves A - Z. Developed since 2012, initially as a support for facilitators of Philosophy for Children, its wider value and impact became clear well before it was published in 2019. It is now being used to good effect with learners from Early Years upwards, and is better than Bloom by almost any criterion: more comprehensive, more comprehensible, more memorable (literally an A - Z) and more immediately practical for both teachers and learners. If you or anyone else would like to know more, here is the website: www.thinking-moves.com, or contact me at rogersutcliffe@outlook.com.
Thanks, Roger. You won’t recall but we met *many* years ago I think at a PLATO conference in Seattle (or was it VC?). I appreciate the value of the moves. They have long been a favorite resource. My next post will look at an alternative way of thinking about the cognitions explicitly, offering a relationship that I think is more organic and resonates well with the thinking moves. All the best.