Bloom's Taxonomy

Blooms Taxonomy.pdf

Benjamin Bloom created this taxonomy to help instructors identify learning objectives and design learning activities. It may be used to help students demonstrate learning by creating learning objectives that use verbs to enhance action. 

The taxonomy has six main categories with new category names written as verbs; remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Each category has sub-concepts.

Bloom’s Taxonomy has intrigued me since I heard about it as a student in one of my graduate courses in Education. This was the time that I was moving from being a classroom teacher/basketball coach to a doctoral/college professor. I found it useful as a way of defining and evaluating my educational goals and aspirations.

Mastery Learning

In 1963, Benjamin Bloom and John B. Carroll developed a learning program, Mastery Learning, to be considered along with children’s learning. It is based on Aptitude, the learner’s capacity for learning. Dr. Carroll views aptitude as needing the amount of time it takes the child to learn the material. He believed that nearly all students could achieve mastery of standard school subjects if  they were given the time they needed to learn them. High aptitude students need a relatively small amount of time to learn; low aptitude students need more than average time to learn. Opportunity to learn is defined as the amount of time allowed for learning.

This idea, which has a great deal of merit, ran into the real world that we teachers were living in. Most of our grade level schools were using the whole class system by which all of the children are learning the same things at the same time. They are given grade promotion by their ability to learn the material that is given to them. If Johnny can’t do the work, does not have the capacity required to learn third grade material, he will be retained (held back, failed, flunked) for another year in the third grade. We were less concerned about the psychological effects on Johnny than we were of his being ‘at class level’  or  ‘behind.’

Having several children needing different lengths of time to learn how to add two fractions interferes with the whole class teaching practice. Individualized learning which deals with this problem was in the future. Coaches have it easier and with more  of a chance for the learners’ improvement than the classroom teacher.

This Really Happened  - My Teaching/Coaching  Opportunity

It's 1952 and I have just been hired to teach a 6th grade class and to coach the junior high school teams in Depue, Illinois. Neither Bloom’s Taxonomy or Mastery Learning is in existence yet.

It’s September and we are all ready for the new basketball season. It’s time for me to meet my new basketball lightweight and heavyweight teams. For our opening sessions, I do some drills, scrimmages, and talk sessions to evaluate where they are and what level to start my practice sessions. I determine that these players have had some really good coaching.  We are past the Remember level. We can start pretty well into the understanding level. We work hard on different and better passing, follow through on their free throw shooting, learning the rules better, making both left handed and right handed layups, a lot of making 6th grade players into 7th grade players and 7th grade players into 8th grade players. 

Unlike in my 6th grade classroom, I can acknowledge individual differences in  my individual players. In fact it is part of my coaching to deal differently with each of my guards, forwards, and centers. My whole team operation is an excellent example of individualized learning. Ron and Montez are completely different forwards; they have different physical traits, they have different movements, each of them simply plays as a unique, gifted athlete. I like that; I accept and encourage that.

The amount of time we spend differently with each player is a given. The more gifted, intelligent players may need and get lesser amounts of time and different kinds of coaching. The poorer players may possibly get more time and coaching attention. We simply must give each player the time and the instruction related to that player's capacity to learn how to play better and experience more joy in playing the game.

We must help everyone to become as good as they can become.