Bloom'S Taxonomy

You have probably seen the pyramid. It was not in the original.

Somewhere in school or in a teacher training course or on a slide in a corporate learning module, you have almost certainly seen a triangular diagram with six levels, starting with something like "remember" at the bottom and building up to "create" at the top. Teachers have been taught for decades that higher is better, that the whole point is to move learners up this staircase, and that a lesson that only involves remembering is somehow inferior to one that involves creating. The man whose name is on the pyramid never drew it that way. Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues in 1956 produced a classification, a way of sorting the kinds of things we want students to do cognitively, so that teachers could see the range of what they were asking and make sure they were not only ever asking for one kind of thinking. It was a map of the territory, not a ladder to climb.

Somewhere between the original book and the posters that ended up in a million classrooms, the map got turned into a hierarchy, and the hierarchy got turned into a value judgement. Remembering became the lowly ground floor, creating became the glittering penthouse, and generations of educators spent energy making sure their lessons were at the top of a structure that never existed. The irony is that remembering and understanding are not lesser. They are the foundation on which everything else depends, and a person who cannot recall the basics cannot analyse or create anything useful. The climb was the myth. The classification was the insight. When you think about someone who is genuinely good at what they do, how much of their skill is actually the obvious basics done really well?

Last week we questioned a pyramid. This week we look at the difference between knowing many things and knowing how those things fit together.