I am also a student.
As such, I have had Bloom's taxonomy of learning and cognitive domains thrust upon me many times. My university classes' "learning outcomes" were full of Bloom's (oddly not Anderson's) terms and concepts from this set of tools for picking apart and understanding how humans in general learn. I think I got most of the concepts and even the skills (earliest kudos go to Mrs. Haufle and Ms. Hassenfritz), but I never absorbed the terms or the long lists of keywords or the definitions.
Now I'm staring at another Bloom's Taxonomy assignment:
Describe and analyze [things]. Based upon your analysis of [things], was [entity X] correct in [action Y]? Why or why not?
Now, I flatter myself that I'm smart, and that I can find and apply relevant knowledge to my comprehension of the problem statement (look up the technical meanings of "describe" and "analyze" and hopefully get what is expected). I'm probably going to do just that because I just realized in trying that I don't really understand the assignment. (More specifically, the requested description and analysis is only partially relevant to the requested decision evaluation.)
There is a piece of my mind that objects. As an educator, the author of this question is an expert in his field and, as such, uses all of the tools and research at your disposal. Awesome! There is an oversight here--an error, if you will--in that the professor seems to expect me to have mastered his profession's jargon before I can understand what he is asking for. This is a great question for other educators to see and pat you on the back for, as it clearly sharpens the student's analysis skills. It says "analyze," doesn't it?
I also took a survey recently from this same university. One of the questions was couched in educator jargon to the point that I didn't understand the question. It was the kind of question that the survey should have been designed to answer, but should not have outright asked. It was a "1-10" type question measuring my understanding of deep education terminology and concepts, but it was intended to measure something else entirely.
In the spirit of not making terrible analogies, I'll spare you a kludgy description of some situation in which the recipient is asked to do something technical in carefully selected, commonly used words that happen to also be jargon. Please just realize that when you, dear reader, as a professional educator, apply systems like Bloom's Taxonomy to ensure that your dialogic pedagogy is thorough and complete, don't just drop the taxonomic terms on the student and expect them to understand. (State and federal assessments: some shame on you for encouraging this behavior in the form of teaching to the tests.) If it's really necessary for you to do so for reasons of conciseness (for which a strong argument can be made), don't just point them to Bloom's definitions and examples and keywords because that's what they did with me and it didn't work. (Honestly, I think Hassenfritz and Haufle tried. I was a strange duck in elementary school.)
Bloom's taxonomy and related research compose a proper metasubject, especially for students who are asked to learn it and apply it to their learning as they're learning, and so deserves careful consideration and pedagogy design. In my humble opinion, students, including myself, can and should study learning as its own subject apart from the learning they're actively doing. This is rarely done.[citation needed] This may well include mixed-mode teaching (kinesthetic/visual/auditory). A well-integrated (too-integrated?) curriculum might be able to apply technical education concepts invisibly until the student is sufficiently mature and educated to recognize them, at which point the common ground between educators and students can be leveraged for synergetic increases in the rate of learning.
(Sorry Mrs. Berthold! I really think 'things' is a good word there!)
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