Was Bloom's Taxonomy Pointed in the Wrong Direction?

Author(s): Sam Wineburg and Jack Schneider Source: The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 91, No. 4 (Dec., 2009 - Jan., 2010), pp. 56-61 Published by: Phi Delta Kappa International Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25594682 . Accessed: 11/05/2013 06:28
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Pyramids portrayed fruit and

in thousands knowledge evaluation intellectual

of classrooms as as low-hanging the terrain of

mountaineers.

Was

Bloom's

Taxonomy Pointed the Wrong in

Benjamin Bloom did not set out to design a poster for teachers. Yet in thousands of classrooms around the world, familiar pictures of pyramids line thewalls. The scheme has been translated into every lan to man, and laminated posters of known guage Bloom's Taxonomy adorn schoolrooms from Okla toTajikistan. homa City toOsaka, Tallahassee Created in a postwar world marked by increasing

Direction?
Placing knowledge at the bottom of the Bloom pyramid sends thewrong message about the importance of knowledge in learning. By Sam Wineburg and Jack Schneider

specialization and fragmentation, Bloom's Taxonomy offered a way of thinking about knowing writ large. Though teachers might call themselves math teachers, or English teachers, or history teachers, theywere re ally all engaged in the same process: teaching students to think.And thinking,whatever particular disciplines
it came in, could be

levels.The taxonomy, in short, promised to establish a scientific sense of order. Bloom was not alone in categorizing human was simplic thought. But the beauty of his taxonomy to Bloom's the original taxonomy was joined by its help mate, the Taxonomy of Affective Educational Out comes, it still remained lean and intuitive, easy to re when
member, ity. It was made up of six categories, not 60. And even

organized

and

classified

according

consultants and picture it. Entrepreneurial cover the basics in an hour-long workshop.

easy

to use.

Teachers

could

close

their

could

eyes

PDKConnect To comment on this article, log inat pdkintl.org and click on PDKConnect.

At thewide and stable base of the taxonomic struc turewas "knowledge." A prerequisite to all of the steps that came afterward, itwas the platform from which students might reach higher and more impressive

SAM WINEBURG

isa professor of education and of history (by cour tesy) at Stanford University, Stanford, California. JACK SCHNEIDER research focuses on the his isa doctoral student at Stanford whose toryof American education.

56

Kappan

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2009/January

2010

";.>

: <

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to be assembled for the purpose of making judg ments. But while mastering new facts can help stu dents see theworld more intelligibly and formulate opinions, it doesn't necessarily follow that itwill more than theorems teach them to think.As math is and science more than formulas, the discipline of history ismore than facts. As historians well know,

ground. Pyramids in thousands of classrooms por as low-hanging fruit and evalua trayed knowledge tion as the terrain of intellectual mountaineers. The pyramid was clear, straightforward, and pop ular. But, at leastwhen it came to the history class room, itwas also upside down. of history, as those Bloomian pyra Knowledge mids imply, can function as a set of building blocks

Assessment of Educational the National as as test AP the and selected as well itself, Progress, our in who did well. those participants study only Over the course of 2Viyears, we followed these stu dents in the hope that we would learn something from about how they approached history. ? an interview with Ja One case from the study cob, an articulate AP student from a private high is both exemplary and illustrative. After school ? theAP exam, on which Jacob scored a 4, we gave him
a document he'd never seen ? a proclamation made

served a variety of Advanced Placement (AP) class rooms inWashington's Puget Sound. In those classes, we tested students on the released items

it is away of thinking about problems, guiding prac titioners through the process of reconstructing the past from incomplete fragments. And the process never ends. Its final destination must always lead to a new beginning.

about Discovery by President Benjamin Harrison to in 1892. We him read the piece aloud, asked Day and to articulate, as he read, what he thought about the document and itshistorical context.

FIG.

1.

THROUGHA STUDENT LENS

Monday through Thursday, students in a typical school high history class work through definitions and new knowledge. On Friday, they're quizzed. In many schools, this goes on from the first day of

Text of Historical

Document

Presented

to Students

DISCOVERY DAY
ANATIONAL HOLIDAY BY OCTOBER21PROCLAIMED THE PRESIDENT
(Washington, July 21) The following proclamation was is sued this afternoonby thePresident:
America

school in September through the beginning of asked for his take on the Christmas break. When the behind practice, one teacher we spoke to logic found succor in Bloom's Taxonomy:
You in critical see, I want kids to engage thinking, but, hey, you can't think about nothing. You need a to get to all those database places, higher-order ? you need knowl Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation can ifyou don't have a you ask questions edge, how and December, data base? So, between September Christmas we start to think.

I, Benjamin Harrison, President of the United

... do hereby appoint Friday, Oct. 21,

States of
1892, the

400th anniversaryof the discovery ofAmerica byColumbus, as a general holiday for the people of theUnited States. On thatday, let the people so far as possible cease from toil and
devote themselves to such exercises to the discoverer ments as may their appreciation of the four completed centuries and best express honor of the great achieve life. of American

I provide themwith a knowledge base, and after

Columbus

It's true thatmany students lack basic knowledge about the past. And plugging gaping holes in student background knowledge is how many savvy history teachers begin each new unit. But does that kind of ? the sort typically purveyed inwork knowledge ? sheets always pave theway to higher-order think Those who go back and read Bloom will find much to praise. That knowledge is the foundation for all further acts of mind, for instance, is a fun damentally sound concept. But our concern is about Bloom inpractice? the way that theTaxon a on own. its of takes life omy Pyramids, after all, are images that point in one direction. Placing knowledge at the bottom often sends the wrong
message.

and en stood in his age as the pioneer of progress is in our age education system of universal lightenment. The the most and salutary feature of the spirit of en prominent and it is peculiarly that the schools appropriate lightenment, the center of the day's demonstration. be made by the people the national and over every school in the house flag float the exercises be such as shall impress upon our

Let

youth the patriotic duties ofAmerican citizenship.

In the churches and in the other people, vine let there be expressions

country,

ing?

which has directed and guidance our blessed people. abundandy

idence for the devout faithof the discoverer, and for theDi
care our history and

of assembly places to Divine of gratitude

of the Prov so

TheNew YorkTimes, July 22, 1892: 8

In a studywe completed several years ago, we ob

Jacob's response was illuminating. "The first is a pioneer thing that jumps out is that Columbus of 'progress and enlightenment,'" Jacob noted, "which was certainly one way of looking at it, but pdkintl.org V91N4 Kappan 57

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from what I've learned, his goals were not entirely noble. Just get rich,whatever. Find a way to the In dies. Show that the Earth wasn't flat. "And then," Jacob grumbled, "it praises him forhis devout faith... he claimed to be a trueChristian, but he also captured and tortured Indians, so he wasn't maybe as noble as this is having him be."

Knowledge mean automatically

possessed knowledge

does

not

deployed.

Asked ifhe noticed anything else, Jacob added: "And the fact that it'sbecoming a holiday thatwe're response was typical among this group of students. And in articulate many ways, his re bright, is He ideal. sponse immediately marshals back about Columbus and uses that ground knowledge to the of the "discov knowledge challenge image His erer" inHarrison's proclamation. Clearly he "com prehends" the document and, in fact, starts on his ascent of the Bloomian peak, comparing the descrip tionwith his own knowledge (Application). He rec ognizes that there are multiple ways of understand and sees that the image of "pioneer ing Columbus A/bcontemporary Columbus has survived. This painting of
years after Columbus' porary description painting, called theJovian Portrait, was painted about 50 death and does not match any contem of the admiral. supposed to revere, that's even worse!"

of progress and Englightment" is one among several possible interpretations (Analysis and Synthesis). Ultimately, he casts doubt on the image, challeng with an alternative critical of Columbus (Eval ing it Relying on his background knowledge about Columbus and using that knowledge as a touchstone for evaluating the document's contents, Jacob pro ceeds through different kinds of thinking. And his response, though still rough around the edges, seems at first blush like critical thinking in the raw. we when showed Indeed, Jacob's thinking to a fo cus group of teachers, this is precisely how many
uation).

to superheroes in order to gain votes in urban cen in post ters," and "the beginning of Pan-Whiteness bellum America."

Huh?

Jacob engaged energetically with the material, ex pressed a forceful opinion about Columbus' voyage, and didn't accept the document at face value. No wonder many teachers viewed Jacob's response fa
vorably.

characterized it. Given how passive students can be when pre sented with new information, this isn't surprising.

Pantheons? Shameless appeals? Pan-Whiteness? Did they even read the same document? To be clear, these graduate students were not spe cialists in American history. In fact, they possessed no more specialized than knowledge of Columbus or AP U.S. But his classmates. what Jacob History the historians did possess was the ability to think his toricallyabout the documents. Right from the start, it's clear what the young his torians are doing differently: "Okay, its 1892." There are many moves that separate the histori ans' readings from Jacob's, but there is none more crucial, none more basic than these three words. a doubt, Jacob knew the story of Colum Without

But what if this document has little to do with even with Columbus himself? 1492? Or...

bus. But he was unable to see the document as a product of unique historical circumstances. To Ja cob, the document was about Columbus. But to the historians, critical thinkingmeant revealing the un seen? asking questions and piecing together some thing they didn't yet know. To them,Harrison's document was born of a par ticular moment. And thismoment, 1892, not 1492 or even 1992, means something. But what exactly mean? This does it
questions.

THROUGHA HISTORICAL LENS

Asked what the same document was about, a group of history graduate students saw something different: "the expansion of the heroic pantheon to include former undesirables," "the shameless appeal 58 Kappan December 2009/January 2010 pdkintl.org

is where the historians start: with

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"So it's the 400th anniversary. Benjamin Harri son. Curious. It's not on the front page. Why? But it is in The New York Times, the so-called national
newspaper."

young historians puzzle, search, piece to context. The story's not important enough to gether be on the front page. What might thismean? Is it significant? Repeatedly, they ask "why?" In dozens of interviews with high school students, not a single one ever asked why. One historian begins making connections: The The 1890s, the beginning of the Progressive Era, end of the century,closing of thefrontier,Freder
wave

swarthy, spoke strange languages, and worshipped God differently than the Protestant majority. Jacob knew this story, at least in broad contour. The great wave of immigration, Ellis Island, Emma Lazarus' "The New Colossus" were stock topics in his AP class, as well as in nearly every other 11th grade history class across the nation. Yet, to access this information and harness itspower, Jacob would have had to think about "Discovery Day" histori cally.

position coming up the following year. Biggest

of immigration inU.S. history.

ick Jackson

Turner,

you've

got

the Columbian

Ex

Pyramids direction.

are

images

Placing often sends the wrong

that point in one at the bottom knowledge message.

"That's it!" That's it? That's what? The young historian was referring to the makeover America was getting at the end of the 19th century. Unprecedented immigration had trans formed the country's look overnight; in the 30 years between 1880 and 1910, 18 million newcomers came to America's shores. And these immigrants were of a different breed ? "Slavs," "Alpines," "He brews," "Iberics," or "Mediterraneans." They were

And yet, Catholics had an ace in the hole in Columbus. What better way to express theirAmer

At the beginning of the 1880s, about 300,000 Italians were in theUnited States; 10 years later, that number had doubled. Joined by a swelling Irish ("Celtic") community, they formed a massive new ? urban Catholics. But political interest group were were their numbers Catholics strong, though stillmuch maligned as un-American "papists."

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Americans. Nothing exemplified thismore clearly than the naming ofwhat would become the nation's fraternal organization: the largest pan-Catholic of in 1882. founded Columbus, Knights

icanism than to tie themselves to the Catholic "dis coverer" of theNew World? Despite their national origins in Ireland, Germany, Poland, or elsewhere, ties to Columbus made these new immigrants "real"

pyramid treats knowledge with all the ? basement glamour of a dank concrete for a house's foundation but hardly necessary the place to host honored guests.

The

The historians reasoned that embracing Colum bus was a political move. By establishing "Discovery Day," Harrison was hoping to usher into the party themillions of new voters who saw Columbus as a hero. If the historians had cared to verify their hunches, theywould have found that theywere on to something. By the time Harrison's "Discovery Day" came along, it merely sanctioned themany cel

Portrait

1888. (Courtesyof theLibrary ofCongress,LC-USZ62 7611.)

of President

Benjamin

Harrison.

George

Prince,

calendar in St. Louis, Boston, Cincinnati, and New Orleans. Harrison wasn't breaking ground; he was pandering. Problem solved. Picture painted. Knowledge gained. That's critical thinking.

ebrations already in place. San Francisco's Italians celebrated their firstDiscovery Day in 1869, and in Italians erected a statue of 1876, Philadelphia's Columbus in that city'sFairmount Park.Well before the 1892 proclamation, the celebration was on the

mean

knowledge deployed. Why would students think Ellis Island and Emma Lazarus if they looked past 1892 and saw only 1492? To call Jacob's reading an instance of critical ? thinking is true by half. It's critical, but there's lit tle thinking in it. Sure Jacob brought some back ground knowledge and strong opinions to this doc ument, but he didn't know how to get at the docu
untold

ment's

KNOWLEDGE DEPLOYED
Let's be fair. What 17-year-old could be expected to possess all of that contextual knowledge? To be in sure, specialists 19th-century American history would have known intricate details like the fact that Harrison wooed Irish Catholics by endorsing home rule in Ireland in the 1892 Republican Platform, or

historians saw the document differently. To them, questions begin at the base of the pyramid: am I What looking at, a diary? A secret commu A government pronouncement? When was nique? itwritten and what else was going on at the time? For them, critical thinking meant determining the knowledge they needed to better understand this The document and its time. "Was there a precedent to Harrison's declara tion?" "Did individual statesmake Oct. 12 a holiday be

story.

that he organized the Irish-American Protective Tariff League. But remember: We didn't quiz spe cialists. We asked graduate students writing their theses on such topics as French colonialists in Tunisia and the aftershocks of the Meiji Restoration. If anything, Jacob and his AP colleagues were at a factual advantage when it came to some of the finer details ofU.S. history. Yet knowledge possessed does not automatically

Proclamation?" "Did the proclamation lash?"

fore the federal declaration?" "If so, was it in states with the largest population of Catholics?" to Harrison's "Was there nativist opposition cause anti-Catholic back

60 Kappan

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"How and when did the event go from a Procla mation in 1892 to becoming a national holiday?" These questions ? what we refer to elsewhere as the "the specification of ignorance" ? distinguished historians from bright high school students, who this document and issued typically encountered Such like the judge's pronouncements, judgments. case on close the gavel, history. Not so with historians. Faced with an unfamiliar document, they framed questions that would help them understand the fullness of the historical mo ment. They emerged from the text curious, puzzled,

To

learn

more

..

Reading

Like a Historian

intervention

inSan

Francisco

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWz08mVUIt8 Historical Thinking Matters

www.historicalthinkingmatters.org Stanford History Education Group

approach inverts the process of historical thinking and distorts why we study history in the firstplace. New knowledge, the prize of intellectual activity, gets locked in the basement.

and provoked. They ended their reading, in other words, ready to learn. For students of history, the pyramid posters have ? or at least upside down. Putting knowl it wrong at the base implies that the world of ideas is edge known and that critical thinking involves gath fully facts to cast judgment. The pyramid known ering treats knowledge with all the glamour of a dank con crete basement?necessary for a house's foundation but hardly the place to host honored guests. Such an

http://sheg.stanford.edu National History Education Clearinghouse

http://teachinghistory.org

Of course knowledge is a prerequisite to critical thinking. But most important, knowledge repre sents its highest aim. And there can be no new new questions. knowledge without The pyramid narrows to a point. Turning iton its K head opens up new worlds.

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