Bloom's Taxonomy...

[Beth in SW WA]

This post on Bloom's (on the blog Quarks & Quirks) has my wheels turning. I would love to discuss...OR feel free to direct me to your favorite links or threads here on this subject.

 

Thanks!

 

Here is the main blog page:

 

Quarks and Quirks: Homeschooling Two Twice-Exceptional Boys

 

Is the author a mom here?

 

:bigear:

 

ETA: To clarify, is the blog author a mom here?

Edited February 24, 2012 by Beth in SW WA

[Bang!Zoom!]

The author of the theory is Benjamin Bloom.

 

This method is the method I was taught to handle my oldest daughter. I'm really familiar with it.

 

Head over to Wickepedia, read some background on it's formation.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_Taxonomy

 

What I'm trying to learn now is to melt the two worlds of classical with the stuff from Bloom which I love so much, it's second nature to me to teach this way.

 

What you are seeing in that article is the "new" terms for Blooms - B. Bloom is long gone now, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Bloom

 

I think the best way to "envision" Blooms Taxonomy is to think of a taxonomy, and then the application of his taxonomy to any taxonomy field. (Does that make sense?)

 

Say the animal kingdom. Let's go to cats. Now study one type of cat via Blooms. Move onto a variant style of cat...it's like endless Venn Diagrams of learning around one small molecule of one subject; it's NOT unit studies, but the direct opposite, it's about seeing relationships and building knowledge - very basic to the highest form, which is creation.

 

Studying Bloom is good stuff in my opinion, and experience, it's rabbit trail heaven actually, which is both good and bad...reigning it in is the hard part, sticking to the outline and the pre planning of a focused study and sometimes just surrendering the surrounding curiosity that develops to a notepad for "another day"..and honestly, it's pretty hopeless to not tie in other fields while studying via Blooms - but if you get into it, the subjects around the subject studied can produce some pretty deep questioning and head turning at the most unexpected moments. Libraries are excellent places to practice the base of knowledge, because you can run all over the joint as the questions arise on the original topic but are really just forces that shaped the original "thing" under investigation.

 

I would have to say that the depth of subject knowledge I've personally seen through this method is pretty amazing. Nothing about it is rote, regurgitate, fill in the bubble and move on.

 

The learning tends to become part of the person, either by sheer length of time, or interest and approach.

[Beth in SW WA]

The author of the theory is Benjamin Bloom.

 

This method is the method I was taught to handle my oldest daughter. I'm really familiar with it.

 

Head over to Wickepedia, read some background on it's formation.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_Taxonomy

 

What I'm trying to learn now is to melt the two worlds of classical with the stuff from Bloom which I love so much, it's second nature to me to teach this way.

 

What you are seeing in that article is the "new" terms for Blooms - B. Bloom is long gone now, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Bloom

 

I think the best way to "envision" Blooms Taxonomy is to think of a taxonomy, and then the application of his taxonomy to any taxonomy field. (Does that make sense?)

 

Say the animal kingdom. Let's go to cats. Now study one type of cat via Blooms. Move onto a variant style of cat...it's like endless Venn Diagrams of learning around one small molecule of one subject; it's NOT unit studies, but the direct opposite, it's about seeing relationships and building knowledge - very basic to the highest form, which is creation.

 

Studying Bloom is good stuff in my opinion, and experience, it's rabbit trail heaven actually, which is both good and bad...reigning it in is the hard part, sticking to the outline and the pre planning of a focused study and sometimes just surrendering the surrounding curiosity that develops to a notepad for "another day"..and honestly, it's pretty hopeless to not tie in other fields while studying via Blooms - but if you get into it, the subjects around the subject studied can produce some pretty deep questioning and head turning at the most unexpected moments. Libraries are excellent places to practice the base of knowledge, because you can run all over the joint as the questions arise on the original topic but are really just forces that shaped the original "thing" under investigation.

 

I would have to say that the depth of subject knowledge I've personally seen through this method is pretty amazing. Nothing about it is rote, regurgitate, fill in the bubble and move on.

 

The learning tends to become part of the person, either by sheer length of time, or interest and approach.

Thanks!

I'm quite familiar with Bloom. I would love to focus on the top levels w/ my dc.

[Bang!Zoom!]

Ah, I'm multi tasking here tonight, totally read the opening post wrong.

 

You wanna tear up the stuff in the comment section? :D :D

 

Man, I went berserk when I read those. I should preface, I viewed them from a "classical" viewpoint. People are missing the point.

 

I ran across Simon Weil not long ago, and I think her thoughts fit absolutely amazingly with the two top levels of Blooms, and in particular, the tie they share in math.

 

Simon Weil

Edited February 24, 2012 by one*mom

[Beth in SW WA]

Thanks!! Anyone else?:bigear:

[Temperance]

Thanks for sharing this post, I saw a Bloom's taxonomy product in the Critical Thinking Company's catalog and had no idea what it was.

 

I'm not so sure about the pyramid diagram. I would picture it as more of a web.

 

I knew I recognized that name, have you read his book on talent development? It is on my wish list.

[8filltheheart]

The hierarchy of learning is at the forefront of my educational objectives.

[Beth in SW WA]

The hierarchy of learning is at the forefront of my educational objectives.

 

You do a fabulous job at this, 8. I'm trying to find the thread you started last year on this topic. We are transitioning from workbooks to more teacher-intensive content. This is what I get for researching STEM and P-BL schools. I want it all! The question is...how much sleep am I willing to sacrifice?

 

Yep. I need a :chillpill:.

[mom4peace]

Author of the Bloom post here.

 

The pyramid structure demonstrates the hierarchy of the skills although it does fail to portray the fluid movement one makes through the levels. Much curricula only taps the bottom layers of the pyramid with little attention to the top. Any work that involve regurgitation of facts or processes does this. This does NOT mean that level of work isn't important at times, but putting a high premium on memorization and simple understanding at the price of analysis, evaluating, and creating limits the learner.

 

It does not take a huge amassing of facts (remembering, understanding) to be able to move to the top of the pyramid (analysis, evaluating, creating). Some of the newer inquiry-based science programs, like Middle School Chemistry from the American Chemical Society (review here), do this beautifully.

 

How does it work at home? We spend far less time on memorization of facts and far more on "playing" with the facts learned. Curricula, like the ones at the end of my post, can help a parent do this with ease, but with some tinkering, almost any material at almost any level can be analyzed and evaluated. We do most of this via conversation. We talk endlessly, addressing the what ifs and wanderings of the mind, especially about history, science, and literature. I'd rather my kids be able to reason through and evaluate a smaller amount of material than memorize but be unable to utilize a larger body of information.

 

Bloom's Heirarchy works with math, too. My younger son started Algebra at 10. He had a brilliant mathematical mind but was still hesitant with multiplication facts and could not figure out long division. (Math is NOT arithmetic. Most elementary math curricula is almost all arithmetic, including Saxon. Math sings. Arithmetic talks.) By the end of Algebra I, his math facts were tightly in his head because he had to use them to make the Algebra work. He also learned long division -- the synthetic division needed for Algebra made sense, and he extrapolated that information to the more basic long division.

 

For literature, avoiding comprehension questions (understanding and remembering levels) and heading straight for the top of the pyramid makes literature come alive. Michael Clay Thompson has a series that makes this far easier to implement, although just reading together and talking about literature can yield the same results.

 

That's a bit of how it works for us. I'm hoping others will tell their tales.

[Beth in SW WA]

Author of the Bloom post here.

 

Hello! *waves hand*

Thanks for chiming in. I love your blog!!! Very inspiring! :)

[mom4peace]

Thanks!

[Chrysalis Academy]

This is such great information. Sarah, I love your blog too. This is very timely and inspiring for me, as I'm moving away from workbook-type materials as well with dd. I knew I needed to do this - part of why I brought her home from ps was because she is "gifted" - (I still feel awkward using this terminology, especially reading about some of your dc!;) I've been lurking here for awhile, wondering if we belonged . . . )

 

She's not off-the-charts, but she is very bright, very quick, very analytical, very good at putting things together, and if something isn't interesting enough to really engage her intellect, she just flies through it, filling in the blanks and answering the questions correctly, but allowing no chance to rest or penetrate her brain . . . it's deceptive, because she can answer everything correctly without understanding on a deep level, just by following the model. She'd been doing this with math, with language arts, with everything in ps. Now that she can't get away with that (with MM) it is definitely leading to struggles, but her brain is really blossoming as well!

 

Back to "I knew I needed to do this but . . . " - the higher-level ways of processing - the top of the pyramid for Bloom, is my analytical style, naturally, and how I have taught and talked to my girls since the beginning. I think that I had feared, because this is fun and pleasurable for us, that it somehow wasn't "enough." (I don't mean that sentence to sound cocky, I'm afraid it does, but that's not my intention). I just worried that reading really excellent material, and having Socratic discussions, wasn't "enough" and that we needed to be doing a workbook too . . . I'm letting that one go, more and more. The proof has been in the pudding with the recent changes I've been making to the what and how of teaching & learning. Moving to using MCT, more focus on literature (reading aloud & discussing, assigned reading & discussion), BFSU for science, Grammar Land instead of FLL, these are some things we've done more of, and dropped a lot of the workbooky-stuff I started out with.

 

I've also just read the Latin-centered curriculum, and his discussion of the level as not being tied to grades/ages, but as levels of processing practiced by students at all ages, really resonates with what I see in dd, too. She was born in the Logic stage, I think, KWIM?

 

Even before reading about this, I'd been thinking ahead and constructing this kind of pyramid for our high-school years: I had planned to finish the overview of history/lit by 10th grade, and spend 11th & 12th on a different style of analysis for each of these areas - 11th grade in critical readings (critical analysis of history, essays, satires, political documents, etc.) and 12th grade in synthesis (the masterworks of lit, Big History, etc.) This seems to fit into Bloom's taxonomy, too, but I'm inspired to find ways to continue to apply the higher levels to learning, every day, here and now, too.

 

Anyway, thanks for talking about this stuff. Very inspiring.

[quark]

How does it work at home? We spend far less time on memorization of facts and far more on "playing" with the facts learned. Curricula, like the ones at the end of my post, can help a parent do this with ease, but with some tinkering, almost any material at almost any level can be analyzed and evaluated. We do most of this via conversation. We talk endlessly, addressing the what ifs and wanderings of the mind, especially about history, science, and literature. I'd rather my kids be able to reason through and evaluate a smaller amount of material than memorize but be unable to utilize a larger body of information.

 

Bloom's Heirarchy works with math, too. My younger son started Algebra at 10. He had a brilliant mathematical mind but was still hesitant with multiplication facts and could not figure out long division. (Math is NOT arithmetic. Most elementary math curricula is almost all arithmetic, including Saxon. Math sings. Arithmetic talks.) By the end of Algebra I, his math facts were tightly in his head because he had to use them to make the Algebra work. He also learned long division -- the synthetic division needed for Algebra made sense, and he extrapolated that information to the more basic long division.

 

For literature, avoiding comprehension questions (understanding and remembering levels) and heading straight for the top of the pyramid makes literature come alive. Michael Clay Thompson has a series that makes this far easier to implement, although just reading together and talking about literature can yield the same results.

 

That's a bit of how it works for us. I'm hoping others will tell their tales.

 

Beautiful Sarah! You express it very elegantly. My favorite:

Math sings. Arithmetic talks.

[Bang!Zoom!]

http://www.odu.edu/educ/roverbau/Bloom/blooms_taxonomy.htm

 

The 3 links underneath are very helpful also.

 

I can't think of her name offhand, but I think it's "coolcat" teacher on twitter is always on top of Blooms implementation, specifically integrating tech w/Blooms.

[mom4peace]

She was born in the Logic stage, I think, KWIM?

 

I certainly do. The amount of information my boys amassed by age five was unreal. My younger, now ten, continues to collect information of history with the same enthusiasm as he does about his more traditional hobbies. But by five, for my younger, and six, for my older, they were fast on their way to analysis and beyond. I appreciate the order of the stages in Classical homeschooling, but I don't think the ages match up for all kids -- for some, they aren't even close. I don't think they're strictly linear either, as I see my kids wander through those stages in no particular order most every day. And that's fine. Being home allows the flexibility to speed up and slow down as needed.

 

I'm impressed how much you have planned for years to come. I'm managing to think through the grade we're in lately. Every time I've tried to project outward, I've been thwarted by the kids who are doing the learning. They seriously test the limits of my flexibility. I suppose that's good.

 

It sounds like you have an amazing daughter. Gifted looks different in different children. My kids are theoretically pretty even in their intelligence (Yes, we've been down that road. They are both such mixes of strengths and weaknesses that we've sought a fair amount of professional wisdom.), but they express it in different ways. I always say that nothing I learned about parenting or homeschooling the first has helped me with the second. Throw in learning disabilities and differences, and it just gets more confusing.

 

Although I know it's not always broadly well-accepted, it really is okay to use the g word (especially in safe places like an accelerated learner forum;)). Kids are different, and some learn incredibly fast. It's delightful, exhausting, and sometimes worrisome all at the same time.

 

Peace

[3Blessings]

As an educator in a traditional school setting, Bloom's taxonomy has been one of the first things I hang up on the wall. As a teacher to my own children, I tend to forget how important it is to keep them climbing up the pyramid. I just want to check boxes to indicate that we are finished.

 

Thanks for the great reminder, Sarah, and I really enjoyed your blog, too.

[Beth in SW WA]

I just want to check boxes to indicate that we are finished.

 

 

 

:bigear:

I would like to overcome that temptation in myself.

 

I'm enjoying your responses here, gang. Thank you!