A Tool You Can Put to Work

The taxonomy is a flexible, adaptable tool that can be applied across large areas of the curriculum and with a wide range of age-groups.

(The caveat here is that Bloom’s Taxonomy is a taxonomy of the cognitive domain. If you are teaching a practical subject, maths or modern foreign languages, things are different. Bloom’s may fit, it may fit in part, or it may not fit at all. If you teach a practical subject and have never come across it, take a look at the taxonomy of the psycho-motor domain. Dave (1971) is my preferred version.)

This is one of its strengths.

The taxonomy reflects the structure of our thought and is organised in a way that echoes the increasing complexity through which we come to understand a particular thing.

As we move up the taxonomy, so we gain mastery.

We can use the taxonomy with different topics. Thousands of them. Perhaps even millions.

In any situation, the wider process remains the same: Learners engage with whatever the content is, through the different processes delineated by the taxonomy.

We might plan a lesson looking at sheep, at bulldozers, at nuclear physics, the poetry of A. E. Houseman or deontological ethics.

In all these cases, we can apply the taxonomy.

Its relevance is not tied to certain types of content.

The only prerequisite is that the content is cognitive in nature.

(After all, Bloom’s Taxonomy is a taxonomy of the cognitive domain.)

For example, we could explain to learners what sheep are, then ask them to pick out examples of sheep from a picture-book, before asking them to explain how they know that a sheep is a sheep and not a cow.

(Knowledge, followed by comprehension, then application.)

Similarly, we could ask learners to read through Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad, to familiarise themselves with the poems, to explain the meaning of a given poem, and then to explain how they might go about identifying whether or not an unclaimed poem had a high chance of being written by Houseman.

(Knowledge, followed by comprehension, then a mixture of application and analysis.)

These examples illustrate how the complexity of the content we are teaching to learners largely defines the degree of complexity inherent to the relative cognitive processes we ask them to pursue.

It is less complex to know what a sheep is than it is to know Houseman’s poem, yet both acts still fall into the category of knowledge.

Equally, it is less demanding to explain why a sheep is not a cow than it is to explain why an unmarked poem may or may not have been written by Houseman.

This shows us why the taxonomy applies to different age-groups as well as to different topics.

The processes it delineates can be engaged in to varying extents.

Evaluation for a seven-year-old is not the same as evaluation for a sixteen-year-old, yet the relationship between application, analysis, and evaluation, as regards a specific piece of content, remains the same.

So does the underlying nature of evaluation.

When a seven-year-old evaluates something, they are calling on the same basic process as when a sixteen-year-old evaluates something.

The extent differs, but the mechanism doesn’t.

This means that we should see the taxonomy as connected to Bruner’s concept of the spiral curriculum.

That idea posits that learners return to key concepts and ideas at different points on their educational journey, each time meeting them at a more advanced stage of development.

Hence, a learner may meet the concept of change multiple times in every year of their school life.

But each subsequent meeting will be at a level higher than the last – as if the learner is journeying up a spiral staircase, revisiting points they have previously seen but at a higher level than was previously the case.

In terms of the taxonomy, learners are capable of climbing the six levels throughout most of their school career (with the caveat that abstract thought is not sufficiently developed in the earliest years to make the higher levels accessible) but the extent of their proficiency, the depth of their understanding, and the complexity of the content with which they are dealing grows as they age.

This leads us to the conclusion that we can apply the taxonomy over large swathes of the curriculum, and we can use it when working with learners of all different ages.