Have You Heard about the Bloom's?

No doubt you are familiar with Bloom's Taxonomy, the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives proposed by Benjamin Bloom in 1956 to classify kinds and levels of thinking. Yet the familiar listing of six levels - knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation - was revised in 2001 by L.W. Anderson and D.R. Krathwohl to reflect changing ideas about learning. You may not be aware of these changes and their benefits to you as an art teacher in the classroom environment.

The revised taxonomy integrates both the kinds of knowledge to be learned and the processes used to learn. The new levels of thinking include (in increasingly complexity) remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and, most notably for art teachers, creating. Creating is described by Anderson and Krathwohl as "putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning, or producing." Isn't this exactly what we want our students to do?

The terminology for writing learning objectives in the revised taxonomy is changed from noun to verb forms to reflect that thinking is an active process. The order of synthesis and evaluation is also switched. These changes reflect the belief that creative thinking is a more complex form of thinking than critical thinking.

What does this mean for art teachers? For a start, we need to be sure that our administrators and fellow teachers are aware of the revision in Bloom's Taxonomy and its focus on creating as the highest order of thinking. We can also use it for planning and developing comprehensive approaches to learning in art, post it in our art rooms, and share it with other teachers. Make it a part of your classroom environment. For further information and an animation of the revised Bloom's Taxonomy as a layer cake, visit Bloom's Bakery.