Is Bloom’s (or DOK) Enough?
Kids can’t think hard unless they have something hard to think about. The tasks we ask our students to engage in then become extra-important as we consider the THINKING Element, where we seek to make kids think really hard every day.
A tool that categorizes levels of cognitive demand that we’ve probably all heard about and used throughout our training and into our daily work is Bloom’s Taxonomy — or more recently, Webb’s Depth of Knowledge framework. (Just Google Bloom’s Taxonomy or Webb’s DOK if you haven’t heard of it or need a refresher.) Bloom’s and DOK provide a hierarchy of cognitive processes and are useful to distinguish between lower-level (rote) and higher-level thinking tasks. Generally speaking, lower-level tasks must be mastered before higher-level tasks (though, I’m certain we can all come up with hundreds of examples where that is not true, so take that “generally speaking” with a grain of salt).
I assert, however, that Bloom’s gives us a false sense of what “thinking hard” really means and looks like. Kids can be thinking very little even if they are performing a higher-order Bloom’s objective and kids can be thinking very hard even when encountering a lower-order Bloom’s objective. The categorization of the task on Bloom’s is not enough to assess how hard kids are thinking.
Bloom’s gives us the WHAT, but it’s still up to the teacher to prepare and execute the HOW — and that’s where hard thinking really comes into play.
A heuristic that has helped me get teachers to promote students thinking really hard on a lesson-level is:
- PAST: What can students already successfully do?
- PRESENT: How can they use what they already know to access and uncover what they don’t yet know?
- FUTURE: What’s new about what they need to learn in this lesson?
When kids are required to use their existing skills and knowledge to access new skills and knowledge, they are necessarily going to be thinking hard. More importantly, you will not be thinking for them.
This isn’t easy. It takes deep knowledge of your content. It takes an understanding of the conceptual connections between different aspects of your content. It takes creativity to organize and arrange experiences for students to see those connections and access something new.
But you know what informs my belief in this? All knowledge and skills, at one point, were unknown. Someone discovered it using only the cognitive processes they already had in their brains and the THINKING that pushed them into new understandings.
And this is, ultimately, what education is all about.
