I have written about the idea of examining ‘what’ is important, but for teachers, it is at least as important to understand how to best teach any subject. I am speaking, especially, about K-12 grades, a time where students (children) are growing and changing at a rapid rate. This creates a quite obvious underlying subtext, that subjects taught to 7 year old students would necessarily be taught differently than a similar subject would to taught to a 15 year old.
The basis for this is generally in the area of cognitive development (i.e. how the brain develops during these periods of a student’s life). This means that there are ideas and concepts which 15 year old students will intuitively grasp, but utterly bewilder 7 year old students. This is where an idea like Bloom’s Taxonomy comes in…
Bloom’s Taxonomy is a hierarchical list of skills in the ‘cognitive domain’ which revolve around knowledge, comprehension, and critical thinking. At the bottom of this list would be merely the accumulation of data, and facts, then demonstrations of comprehension of these bits of data (i.e. organizing, comparing, describing, interpreting…). There are further levels equating to ‘Application’ (using this new knowledge to solve problems), ‘Analysis’ (making inferences, and identifying component parts of this new information), ‘Synthesis’ (recombining this information into new patterns or proposing alternative solutions), and finally ‘Evaluation’ (making judgments about information). All in all this is essentially a ladder of increasing depth and sophistication in thought and the use of more and more powerful tools to consider facts and ideas.
I always thought that this would imply that broadly and generally speaking, the lower grades in elementary school shouldn’t have to spend too much time analyzing organizational principals or debating the quality of a piece of information based upon a set of criteria… Seriously though, I always thought that it meant that younger students could (with some reasonable justification) spend a larger portion of their time learning and comprehending facts and ideas versus dealing with increasing amounts of abstraction, debate and evaluation.
I think that this may be the singular, most powerful idea I learned in teacher’s college (sic). Unfortunately I have never seen it used in any systematic manner…ever (even in college). Admittedly, by ‘what I have seen’ is anecdotal in nature and certainly not a comprehensive indictment of the educational establishment. It only makes me a bit sad…
