How learning music made me look at Bloom's Taxonomy differently
Giving structure and imagery to Bloom's—and viewing it as a hierarchy—does it a disservice.
I’m not the first person to open a new page and decide to write about the Bloom’s Taxonomy debate. Look, here’s a 2018 Education Week article as one example.
If you’re not familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy or haven’t come across it in a while, here’s a quick refresher. It’s defined by Wikipedia as a “framework for organizing educational goals.” Unfortunately, the framework of organizing these goals is often represented using a pyramid, which suggests a hierarchy of sorts:
Most educators will consult Bloom’s taxonomy when writing learning objectives for their lessons, looking for “action verbs” from which they can create measurable assessments. For instance, I can’t measure if a student “understands solving for slope,” (what does “understanding” look like?) but I can measure if a student can “solve the equation for slope.”
The problem with Bloom’s
The debate has been had time and time again: representing learning in this way suggests a hierarchy of sorts. According to Bloom’s critics, the verbs under the “remember” category, the so-called “lower level” thinking skills, are viewed as less important, while the verbs that fall under the “create” category are seen as the end-all, be-all goal. Educators are often pushed to include “higher level” Bloom’s verbs in their lessons to ensure intellectual rigor in learning.
It also suggests you’ll always learn in a specific order: first you remember something, then you apply, then analyze, etc. That’s not always the case, though; a more discovery-based learning activity might have a learner try creating something, analyzing that creation, and then gaining a deeper understanding of what the primary components are. Or, they may be learning something that requires them to hop all over Bloom’s categories.
Let me be clear: I agree with this critique of Bloom’s. I don’t thinking representing learning in a linear or hierarchical fashion is helpful. It’s not useful to do a bunch of remembering (“lower-level Bloom’s”) and then do nothing with that knowledge; at the same time, it’s not helpful to create a bunch of stuff (“higher-level Bloom’s”) without a deeper understanding of the what, why, and how behind the creation.
However, I do think Bloom’s can be helpful. In learning design, it can help us more clearly define goals and understand the type of thinking required to meet them.
The problem here isn’t Bloom’s, then—it’s the linear fashion we’re using to interpret the taxonomy. I think, as humans, we tend to default to seeing things as linear. Thus, learning is linear: we have chapters that move forward in textbooks. We work our way up from Calc I, to Calc II, to Calc III and Linear Algebra. We set up our modules in our Learning Management Systems numbered 1, 2, and 3.
We’ve put Bloom’s into this bucket as well: first we remember, then we apply, then we analyze and evaluate. Neat steps, moving forward.
Breaking out of linear education
For anyone who didn’t subscribe to this newsletter when I first released it, it might be news to you that I’ve been taking cello lessons. I don’t have any musical background, really, except playing flute for a little in 4th grade (I have no actual memory of this).
More recently, I started reading the book Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time by Natalie Hodges recently. One quote really struck me, in thinking about not only learning cello but about learning in general:
Rondos have the mesmerizing effect of moving you linearly and circularly through time, at the same time: By progressing from theme to theme through the development sections, the rondo consistently brings you around and back again to the music with which you began.
Learning cello is, quite obviously to me as a learner, both linear and circular. I progress through learning new skills and positions while coming back to and re-learning those same concepts in a new way: the D-major scale in a new octave. Counting triplets vs. counting quarter notes or eighth notes (I’m still pretty beginner here people).
And then I got this anonymous feedback from my end of course eval, emphasis my own (another reminder, I teach an asynchronous course part-time for a local university):
I think I learned the most from the Unit Projects because they made me think about all the modules in conjunction with each other….but all of them still taught me to think about how each topic flowed into each other. Especially in online classes, it's very easy to forget what the previous module was about, so the unit projects eliminated that by always having us think about the unit as a whole.
In rondos, the listener and the player are aware on some level that they’re progressing through the circle. You’re moving linearly toward the end of the song, but you have a sense of its spiraling, repeating nature. I think this spiral is what gets lost in education.
How can we make the circle of learning more visible?
Revealing the spiral
I STILL PRESENT EVERYTHING SO LINEARLY IN MY OWN COURSE. GAH!
Here’s one example, at the beginning of the course, when I’m giving students a run down of what they’re about to learn for the term:
and I typically include as the first slide in each brief lecture video a quick run down of how all of the immediately recent/forthcoming content fits together:
I’m clearly trying to make the relationship between different topics stronger and more connected, but I fear they’re still disjointed being shown only in a linear fashion (layer this on by putting all course content and assignments into the extremely-linear LMS modules).
What is the rondo for learning?
I get that some students (based on that anonymous comment) are seeing how our course topics fit together as we loop back around to connected concepts. But as I’ve thought about Bloom’s, the Uncommon Measure quote, and my student’s comment, I’ve really been thinking about how I can practice this in my learning design more intentionally.
How can I make it almost expected or anticipated: bringing learners back to the familiar, but each time, possessing a larger network of knowledge with which they can make connections?
From linear to spiral
I don’t really have an answer for this yet, but it’s something I want to continue thinking about. What are anchoring themes I could write into curriculum for students to revisit with a regular cadence—that they can build upon, tweak, and manipulate?
I’m reminded of something Justin Cerenzia wrote over at The Academic DJ recently about a structured constructive retrieval and elaboration intervention. I recommend you check it out in full, but he discusses having students revisit portions of a predetermined list of course concepts every eight days, in the same structured activity.
To me, the idea of the learning spiral provides not only more opportunities for reinforcement, but can exist an anchoring schema which learners can use to more explicitly build and grow their conceptual connections.
Concluding questions
As I often do, I’m going to end with questions to consider the next time you’re designing learning, whether it’s a one-hour workshop, a full semester course, or a series of training videos.
How can I create a learning spiral with anchoring themes?
What content signals can I use to help indicate this reinforcement?
What activities can I incorporate to reinforce the spiral more intentionally?
What can I incorporate into my existing summative activities to more intentionally include the spiral?
Have you tried to incorporate a more circular approach to learning in your teaching or training? Share your strategies with me in the comments!
Thanks for reading and learning with me 👋🏻