Bloom, Flipped

Via Downes, I like this idea of Flipping Bloom’s Taxonomy Triangle which draws on the following inverted pyramid originally posted here: Simplified Bloom’s Taxonomy Visual and comments on a process in which “students are spending the majority of their time in the Creating and Evaluating levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and they go down into the lower levels to acquire the information they need when they need it” (from Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams’ Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student In Every Class Every Day, perhaps?)

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Here’s another example, from a blog post by education consultant Scott Mcleod: Do students need to learn lower-level factual and procedural knowledge before they can do higher-order thinking?, or this one by teacher Shelley Wright: Flipping Bloom’s Taxonomy.

This makes some sort of sense to me, though if you (mistakenly?) insist on reading it as a linear process it lacks the constructivist context that shows how some knowledge and understanding can be used to inform the practice of the playful creating/evaluating/analysing exploratory layer, which might in itself be directed at trying to illuminate a misunderstanding or confusion the learner has with respect to their own knowledge at the understanding level. (In fact, the more I look at any model the more issues I tend to get with it when it comes to actually picking it apart!;-)

As far as “remembering” goes, I think that also includes ‘making up plausible stories or examples” – i.e. constructed “rememberings” (that is, stories) of things that never happened.

Author: Tony Hirst

I'm a Senior Lecturer at The Open University, with an interest in #opendata policy and practice, as well as general web tinkering...