Guess what? You’re probably training someone right now! Are you a shift manager at a restaurant, are you a parent, or will you be working alongside a new hire? Yes? Trainer, trainer, trainer!! This is an occasional series to introduce you to important educational constructs.
Bloom’s Taxonomy
or It’s more than just “understanding”
Bloom’s Taxonomy http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/ is “a framework for categorizing educational goals”. When I was beginning education grad student, I thought the goal of every lesson was for learners to “understand” stuff. “You know, I don’t know, students will understand that the civil war was really important, for, you know, everyone in the south after it was over.” That’s some pretty content-free stuff right there, which is pretty much how my first teaching attempts went. Thank heavens I finally began to grok Bloom’s Taxonomy which breaks learning into categories, starting with 3 domains: Cognitive, Affective and Psychomotor.
Cognitive
We’ve gotten pretty cognitive-centric in this country. Sometimes it seems like we only care about learners regurgitating facts. There are plenty of other, more interesting, kinds of cognitive goals. Learners can apply knowledge from one area to a new one, or they can analyze data, or they can evaluate the quality of proposition. These all likely seem pretty familiar from your schooldays, but we use a lot of these skills whenever we read or write a report or clean out inbox. Our problems begin when we forget that we’re not just memorizing facts– we need to give our trainees the tools to make value judgments and act appropriately. One way to demonstrate these skills to talk through our decision points with trainees. You’ll be astounded what goes into some of your decisions.
Affective
I’ve heard “no one cares about feelings” in funding or grant reporting, and really what a shame it is. It’s indicative of what low regard the non-cognitive domains are held by the fact that most resources don’t even list them. Here’s why the affective domain matters: The best learning happens when there is emotional connection to the material and there is a positive attitude. I don’t think that you should pander to learners, but I do think you should care about how engaged they are in the material. There is a shared responsibility for learners to be receptive, but for instructors to create relevant lessons for learners to develop positive attitudes about both the material, and their ability to learn it. That doesn’t mean dumb it down. That means care about how your lesson is being received.
Psychomotor
Isn’t it a shame that past kindergarten there is almost no attention paid to psychomotor learning in schools? I don’t mean that students should be punished by forced participation in dodgeball games. I mean that there should be more opportunities for physicality in our learning environments, like more drawing, sewing, cooking, carpentry, wiring, and all other sorts of hands on activities. I find that young people are desperate for opportunities to make things, and they need instruction on the physical techniques required for successful completion of these tasks.
I find that when I design educational activities I am most successful if I can plan for multiple levels of cognitive activities, with subject matter that learners find relevant, and with opportunities for them to move and interact. Formal training has almost become synonymous with direct instruction followed by some knowledge-based series of questions. That’s just not best practice.
