Bloom’s hourglass

Blooms taxonomy - the hourglassSam Wineburg & Jack Schneider make an interesting case for inverting Bloom’s Taxonomy in their Education Week article. They show quite handily how being able to analyze before doing anything else in a history class might be the way to see if students really understand the material. And it would seem that they are indeed correct, to a point. I would suggest that the question that was asked in the history example is one that could only be asked of students who had already reached the top of the classic pyramid.

The worksheets that the teachers classically start units off with are useful for (there are also updated “digital” versions), if nothing else, the development of a vocabulary about “X”. That vocabulary can then be understood, applied, analyzed, synthesized and finally evaluated within a restricted field. Once questions are asked that cross these individual fields, the pyramid must be flipped in order to tease the information apart and get to the facts of the case. This way we know that the students know what we think they should as they are able to return to the “facts” that they were presented originally.

We might indeed be better off describing the concept as a torus (hat tip to D’Arcy) that goes around feeding itself, but that conversation could go on forever… so we won’t start it 😉


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