Pedagogy
Aim higher: Bloom's taxonomy
Bloom's taxonomy is a ladder of thinking. At the bottom you remember a fact; at the top you make something new with it. Most courses never leave the bottom rung, then wonder why nobody is engaged.
In the 1950s Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues sorted the things we ask learners to do into six levels, from the simplest kind of thinking to the most demanding. A later revision gave us the version most people use today:
- Remember — recall a fact.
- Understand — explain it in your own words.
- Apply — use it in a new situation.
- Analyse — break it apart and see how it fits together.
- Evaluate — weigh it up and make a judgement.
- Create — make something new from it.
The first two are lower-order. The last four are higher-order. That distinction is the whole point.
Where training goes wrong
Most workplace learning parks people at the bottom two rungs. Watch the video, remember the policy, pass the multiple-choice check. It feels safe and it is easy to measure. It is also where boredom lives.
Curiosity is a higher-order emotion. You don’t get it from remembering.
Real engagement — the feeling of being stretched — comes from analysing, judging and building. A course that never asks for those isn’t playing it safe. It has removed the very thing that would grab someone.
Aiming up, in practice
Pitching higher does not mean skipping the basics. It means not stopping at them. Give people a real problem before they feel ready, so the facts have somewhere to stick. Ask them to judge two options before you hand them the rule. Get them building early, badly, and improving.
The facts still get learned — better, in fact, because they are now attached to something that mattered. You can watch this happen on the homepage: toggle the taxonomy pyramid between passive and active and see how much of it lights up.
The test, as ever, is not what a learner was shown. It is what they can now do with it — and how far up the ladder that reaches.