Bloom's taxonomy

It was my developmental, not my developmental, sorry, my line editor who checked that for me, and thank goodness she did, right? But you, you said like, you know, "Why did you start writing and why this?" Right? So if I can, I'd love to answer that.

I was in a graduate education course in 2004, and there's something in education called Bloom's Taxonomy, and the lowest-

Yes

... level...

Great.

The, so the lowest level of Bloom's Taxonomy is low-level thinking.

It's identity recall.

And the example used in that class was, in what year did Christopher Columbus sail the ocean blue? And everybody knows it was 1492.

The thing that I think is so, so, so helpful, I've mentioned it on this show before, which is it's really, really good to have a framework.

We need to work our way up Bloom's taxonomy where we are going from just like remembering that these things exist to understanding why they exist.

So using them effectively.

analyzing them, break it down.

You mentioned me being an educator myself and my co-founder, Maya Bhattacharjee, that we founded at Marcy Lab School in 2019, both of us previously having backgrounds in education and school leadership.

One of the first things you learn as a first-year teacher is this beautiful framework called Bloom's Taxonomy.

It's almost like the food pyramid of teaching.

And the idea is that it kind of lays out a series of kind of like educational attainments with the bottom being essentially just like recall with the top of that pyramid being creation and evaluation.

You mentioned, um, me being an educator myself and my co-founder, Maya Bhattacharjee, and we founded Marcy Lab School in 2019, both of us, uh, previously having backgrounds, uh, in education and school leadership.

Uh, one of the first things you learn, uh, as a first-year teacher is this, uh, beautiful framework called Bloom's Taxonomy.

It's like this-- It's almost like the food pyramid of teaching.

Um, and the idea is that, um, it kind of lays out a series of kind of like, uh, educational, um, attainments, uh, with the bottom being essentially just like recall, um, with, and then with the top of that pyramid being creation and evaluation.

So what does this all mean? Let's recap this journey we've been on today.

We start by looking at the sheer exhaustion of grading AI slop and why traditional assignments, that linear climb up Bloom's taxonomy, are fundamentally broken when a machine can jump straight to the create phase.

Then we examined the paradigm shift of inverted blooms.

We moved from valuing the generation of an artifact to valuing the rigorous critique of that artifact.

They know that students are operating on a recall level, so they have all these answer choices that have plenty of details that were in the passage, and the only way that you're going to get the right answer is not by recalling facts, but by analyzing the situation and going a level deeper.

So when I was in school, my teachers taught me a hierarchy of thinking called Bloom's Taxonomy, right? And in Bloom's Taxonomy, and we'll show you on the screen, you can see at the bottom level is recall, right? And in higher levels, we have things like analysis or even synthesis, right? The SAT is going to require you to engage in these higher levels of thinking, and to do so requires students to do two things.

One, to throw out the way that they've approached tests for so much of their life that has given them success in the classroom, and two, learn how to engage in different modes of thinking when they're doing multiple choice, which is just a totally different exercise.

So in that sense, two things going on.

And then with creativity, I feel like, well, I do a lot of project based learning, especially when we're wrapping up units and that sort of thing.

Bloom's taxonomy is my go-to.

So I feel like a lot of times my co-teacher and I, right, we'll sit down, she might give me the questions that she's going to use in the classroom and I'll read them and I'll say, okay, how can I still get this concept, like compare and contrast across to my gifted kids, but at another level, like how can I add evaluative thinking in that? How can I push it to creative thinking? And so it takes a lot of planning on the back end, for me, but putting in all that work behind the scenes is what helps it to run smoother in the classroom.

So I guess circling back to your original question, definitely I use Bloom's Taxonomy.

I use that all the time.

Discussion and teaching how to have a discussion and being very validating of questions.