Bloom and his remarkable Taxonomy
So how does this work?
Back in 1955, a committee of American educational professionals devised a set of three hierarchical models used for classifying educational objectives. Benjamin Bloom was the chair of this committee, so the Taxonomy came to be known as his. Today, decades later, many schools and universities around the world still use Bloom’s Taxonomy, and Gramatica does too. It is so well known that it is often known simply as Bloom.
In 2001, a revision was made by a group of educators led by David R. Krathwohl, and this is the variation that is commonly used today.
These three models were the Cognitive, the Psychomotor (dealing with physical actions) and the Affective (dealing with emotions). The one we are dealing with is the Cognitive model (below), which deals with thinking and ways of learning.
This is Bloom as applied to learning with Gramatica.
In 2001, a revision was made by a group of educators led by David R. Krathwohl, and this is the variation that is commonly used today.
These three models were the Cognitive, the Psychomotor (dealing with physical actions) and the Affective (dealing with emotions). The one we are dealing with is the Cognitive model (below), which deals with thinking and ways of learning.
This is Bloom as applied to learning with Gramatica.
As you can see, the Taxonomy has a number of levels, beginning with Remember at the lowest level and Create as its highest.
Remember
This is the lowest level of learning, and is commonly referred to as Low-level thinking. This level is described as “Exhibiting memory of learned materials by recalling facts, terms, basic concepts and answers.” This form of learning is a common aspect of life. When we remember something, for example, we deposit this bit of information into short-term memory. We may not necessarily know why this thing is important, how it is used, what it means or anything else. We just know we have to remember it. In the same way, your students understand that the classroom is a place of learning, and Teacher told us this bit of information for a purpose, so they know that they should remember it.
Many of us also have memories of high school exams, when we crammed madly in the final days before an exam, hoping to jam as much as possible into our poor brains as possible. Then, during the exam, we repeated it on the page, then walked out of the exam room and promptly forgot everything. Many of us will smile at this anecdote.
We also remember how little of that information we retained in the days, weeks and years afterwards. Why? Because much of that information was not relevant. It served an examiner’s purposes, not our own. It had a short-term benefit, but not a long-term one. It was possibly of little use in our daily lives.
Therefore, in your English class, assuming that your class uses the same methods as the school experiences that your students remember, they might use the same type of thinking and learning. Without properly understanding the material, but knowing that a test is imminent, they memorise furiously in order to pass the test, believing that a good mark on their student report is a key indicator to their command of the English language
This is not to say that remembering things is useless, but that we have to use it as the foundation for the next level, not by itself.
I should pause briefly here to say that many cultures around the world have placed a great emphasis on memorisation, particularly in settings in the ancient world where memorisation and imitation of teachers was the only way of learning. A Hebrew boy, for example, memorised large parts of the Torah by the time of his bar mitzvah at the age of 13. The modern movie Book of Eli also uses this idea of memorisation very effectively indeed.
Applying this Remember level to the modern ESL classroom, it means that students who demonstrate this lowest level are good reference texts. They know about the grammatical concepts and can list the names of the tenses, the conditionals and the various verb types. However, do they know how to apply this knowledge to create their own spoken and written texts? They may be able to describe past perfect but not use it. They can recognise a non-defining relative clause but not construct one. They are at the lowest level of understanding. We might call this form of knowledge reactive. They produce language best in response to the exercises in a textbook but when asked to construct language independent of the textbook, they may struggle.
I remember many years ago a fellow teacher commenting on the regular tests we were using at the time at an ESL college to test the knowledge of adult ESL students. He said that the tests weren’t proper metrics for student ability as they tested what students could remember, but not necessarily what they could create. I thought he was splitting hairs at the time but he was right, as proved by Bloom.
Apply
This is the next level up from Remember. This is the level that thousands of students use in English schools across the world. Using this level of thinking, students both use low-level thinking to remember and understand the material, the lowest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy. They then use the knowledge they have remembered to complete coursebooks and worksheets.
However, many of these activities require a passive and responsive way of thinking. Students only need to exert their cognitive and mental faculties just enough to answer the coursebook or worksheet question. Often, they are actually doing the activities in order to please you, the teacher, not necessarily to learn.
This is the level of learning that teachers often encounter when they look over some low marks after a test and shake their heads, saying with some feeling, “But I taught them that! Why didn’t they learn?”
Create
Now let’s skip some intervening levels and go to the Create level.
This is the top level of thinking, also known as High-level Thinking, which can be thought of as “Building a structure or pattern from diverse elements.” This might also be expressed as “Putting parts together to form a whole” or “Compiling information together in a different way by combining elements in a new pattern or proposing alternative solutions.”
At this level, students have passed through the levels of the Taxonomy at varying levels of speed. The quicker students in your class will go from Remember to Apply and skip several levels to go straight to Create. They don’t need the intervening levels. Other students will need to spend some time in Analyse and/or Evaluate.
The wonderful thing about this top Create level is that this form of knowledge is much more proactive. Students are not passive responders to material, but active creators. They have made a mental shift from passive responders to information to active creators of stories. At this level, your students want to, and are actively involved in using the tools they have learned to make their own spoken and written texts. They are also re-casting existing structures into new ones. In some ways, they are almost mirroring the kind of instinctive language producing abilities that babies use. In this form of knowledge as well, especially as it applies to ESL classrooms, students are independent of the textbook. The classroom here is not only a place to learn new grammatical and vocabulary tools, but also a valuable and safe place for students to use and rehearse with these tools for use in daily life.
And Gramatica?
It is this top level of Create that Gramatica aims at consistently. When students use High-level Thinking, they can transfer what they learn in the classroom out into their daily lives, with jobs, further studies, friends, finances, leisure, hobbies and future dreams. They have become independent thinkers. Indeed, they make mistakes, but they now have a foundation to stand on and the confidence to move forward.
Remember
This is the lowest level of learning, and is commonly referred to as Low-level thinking. This level is described as “Exhibiting memory of learned materials by recalling facts, terms, basic concepts and answers.” This form of learning is a common aspect of life. When we remember something, for example, we deposit this bit of information into short-term memory. We may not necessarily know why this thing is important, how it is used, what it means or anything else. We just know we have to remember it. In the same way, your students understand that the classroom is a place of learning, and Teacher told us this bit of information for a purpose, so they know that they should remember it.
Many of us also have memories of high school exams, when we crammed madly in the final days before an exam, hoping to jam as much as possible into our poor brains as possible. Then, during the exam, we repeated it on the page, then walked out of the exam room and promptly forgot everything. Many of us will smile at this anecdote.
We also remember how little of that information we retained in the days, weeks and years afterwards. Why? Because much of that information was not relevant. It served an examiner’s purposes, not our own. It had a short-term benefit, but not a long-term one. It was possibly of little use in our daily lives.
Therefore, in your English class, assuming that your class uses the same methods as the school experiences that your students remember, they might use the same type of thinking and learning. Without properly understanding the material, but knowing that a test is imminent, they memorise furiously in order to pass the test, believing that a good mark on their student report is a key indicator to their command of the English language
This is not to say that remembering things is useless, but that we have to use it as the foundation for the next level, not by itself.
I should pause briefly here to say that many cultures around the world have placed a great emphasis on memorisation, particularly in settings in the ancient world where memorisation and imitation of teachers was the only way of learning. A Hebrew boy, for example, memorised large parts of the Torah by the time of his bar mitzvah at the age of 13. The modern movie Book of Eli also uses this idea of memorisation very effectively indeed.
Applying this Remember level to the modern ESL classroom, it means that students who demonstrate this lowest level are good reference texts. They know about the grammatical concepts and can list the names of the tenses, the conditionals and the various verb types. However, do they know how to apply this knowledge to create their own spoken and written texts? They may be able to describe past perfect but not use it. They can recognise a non-defining relative clause but not construct one. They are at the lowest level of understanding. We might call this form of knowledge reactive. They produce language best in response to the exercises in a textbook but when asked to construct language independent of the textbook, they may struggle.
I remember many years ago a fellow teacher commenting on the regular tests we were using at the time at an ESL college to test the knowledge of adult ESL students. He said that the tests weren’t proper metrics for student ability as they tested what students could remember, but not necessarily what they could create. I thought he was splitting hairs at the time but he was right, as proved by Bloom.
Apply
This is the next level up from Remember. This is the level that thousands of students use in English schools across the world. Using this level of thinking, students both use low-level thinking to remember and understand the material, the lowest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy. They then use the knowledge they have remembered to complete coursebooks and worksheets.
However, many of these activities require a passive and responsive way of thinking. Students only need to exert their cognitive and mental faculties just enough to answer the coursebook or worksheet question. Often, they are actually doing the activities in order to please you, the teacher, not necessarily to learn.
This is the level of learning that teachers often encounter when they look over some low marks after a test and shake their heads, saying with some feeling, “But I taught them that! Why didn’t they learn?”
Create
Now let’s skip some intervening levels and go to the Create level.
This is the top level of thinking, also known as High-level Thinking, which can be thought of as “Building a structure or pattern from diverse elements.” This might also be expressed as “Putting parts together to form a whole” or “Compiling information together in a different way by combining elements in a new pattern or proposing alternative solutions.”
At this level, students have passed through the levels of the Taxonomy at varying levels of speed. The quicker students in your class will go from Remember to Apply and skip several levels to go straight to Create. They don’t need the intervening levels. Other students will need to spend some time in Analyse and/or Evaluate.
The wonderful thing about this top Create level is that this form of knowledge is much more proactive. Students are not passive responders to material, but active creators. They have made a mental shift from passive responders to information to active creators of stories. At this level, your students want to, and are actively involved in using the tools they have learned to make their own spoken and written texts. They are also re-casting existing structures into new ones. In some ways, they are almost mirroring the kind of instinctive language producing abilities that babies use. In this form of knowledge as well, especially as it applies to ESL classrooms, students are independent of the textbook. The classroom here is not only a place to learn new grammatical and vocabulary tools, but also a valuable and safe place for students to use and rehearse with these tools for use in daily life.
And Gramatica?
It is this top level of Create that Gramatica aims at consistently. When students use High-level Thinking, they can transfer what they learn in the classroom out into their daily lives, with jobs, further studies, friends, finances, leisure, hobbies and future dreams. They have become independent thinkers. Indeed, they make mistakes, but they now have a foundation to stand on and the confidence to move forward.
Vanderbilt University Centre for Teaching
