Tom Bennett

I Will Have At Thee With Mine Index Finger! Or, Two Thumbs Good

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Not for the first time, I did a double take during a lesson today. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought one student was texting. During an AS Physics lesson? Shameful! This behaviour cannot and must not be tolerated!

But she wasn’t texting at all. She was actually using her scientific calculator to solve projectile problems exactly as I’d asked her to do — but using her thumbs to press the keys rather than her fingers. And she was holding the calculator in exactly the way she would hold a smartphone when texting.

Possibly this seems unremarkable to you. I guess it depends on your generation. It seems remarkable to me. Let me explain why.

Similar to my first calculator, but ours had even more keys.

I still remember the first scientific calculator that entered my parents’ house. It was a hulking unwieldy thing with a primitive red LED display that completely drained a 9V battery after barely an hour of use; it also had what seemed like a button for each and every function (e.g. a separate button for both sine and inverse sine), since the SHIFT key had yet to be invented. It was still hailed as a liberator, since it freed me from the tedium of looking up values in printed, mark you, printed log and sine tables.

The calculator was placed flat on the table, or held in my left hand, and the keys pressed using my right index finger. It’s the way I still use a calculator today.

Not so the young folks of today. They have been raised from birth using a variety of teeny tiny little keyboards. I don’t know if it was a lone, unsung genius who figured out that holding a touch screen keypad firmly in both hands and operating the keys using two thumbs was preferable to the I-shall-stab-at-thee-with-mine-index-finger method, or whether it hailed from the mind of Steve Jobs or his minions, but the technique has conquered the world.

Even I use it with my phone these days, although at such a slow, cack-handed pace that it makes any teenagers in the vicinity wince with frustration.

And why do I think that this is worth commenting on? Because this is an example of a real live copper-bottomed twenty-first century skill. It is an efficient, effective way of interacting with mobile electronic technology

You know the “Shift Happens“* brigade, those folks who say that the current education system is not teaching the skills necessary for the world of tomorrow?

Well, taught or not, it seems that some of the “skills of tomorrow” are developing apace. And I think that it is a skill that could not have been anticipated by any futurologist. It developed to meet a need to input data quickly and accurately on a mobile device.

But you know what has not changed for the student I mentioned above? The mathematical knowledge required to press the number and function keys in the correct sequence. I may not have taught my students the “two thumbs” input technique, but at least I taught them the mathematical foundations required to use a calculator to solve Physics problems. The other stuff they were able to teach themselves. (Good thing too, because I don’t think I could.)

I feel that examples like this quite take the wind out of the sails of those who claim that traditional teaching is too “old hat” to be taken seriously: it’s the traditional skills that provide the footing for the new skills. I think that we ignore that truth at our peril.

The fact is that human beings have adapted successfully to many novel changes in the past. The likelihood is that we will continue to do so, albeit in ways that may well be surprising and unexpected. But the point is, we generally build on or adapt things which have worked in the past. Evolution rather than revolution if you will.

I think that too many people have claimed oracular powers to see into the future and thus justify the revolutionary changes they wish to make to the education system. Frequently these appeals sound plausible and have emotional power, with phrases like flexibility and creativity and breaking the factory model, but as Tom Bennett points out in Chapter 9 of his excellent Teacher Proof, these buzzwords are about as deep and thoughtful as they go. Pragmatic Education also also does a good job of taking down one of these oracles in a recent post.

There is no royal road to educational nirvana, no quick revolutionary fix to make people learn without effort and hard work.

Do you want me to walk otherwise than with my feet, and to talk otherwise than with my mouth?
— Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary

I think that, as Voltaire suggests, we will continue to walk with our feet and talk with our mouths for a long whiles yet. But we may well be typing more with our thumbs…

*The Youtube video that has launched a thousand CPDs

Bloom Schloom; or, some research what I have auto-didactically done

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“Use Bloom’s taxonomy here for a quick win with Ofsted!!!!”
— AHT giving lesson observation preparation advice, sometime in 2013. [Note: the multiple exclamation points are to give the reader some indication of the evangelical zeal with which this advice was imparted.]

 

 “I can’t remember the last time I met a teacher who knew if Bloom’s taxonomy was ever criticised”   — Tom Bennett, Teacher Proof, Kindle Locations 191-192. Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition 2013

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I must confess, at the outset, that Bloom’s taxonomy has never sat right with me: for example, is it always the case that creating is always more cognitively demanding than (say) applying? So, creating a story about how the dog ate my homework is more cognitively demanding than applying Einstein’s time dilation equation?

I thought I was alone in my scepticism until I came across Tom Bennett’s comment (quoted above). However, even our very own Ben Goldacre-style enfant terrible of the educational research world doesn’t put the boot in to Bloom’s flipping taxonomy any further, although he does do a good job on knocking down de Bono’s coloured hats (as well as several other pieces of educational “wisdom” that he reveals to be not so wise  — read the book!)

And so I present my Bennett-ian take on Bloom’s taxonomy, the fruit of at least one afternoon of casual internet research — I’m sorry I’ll rephrase that, Ernie Wise-style, as “the research what I have auto-didactically done”. (And please note that I do not mean to imply in any way shape or form that Tom Bennett’s research for his book was as slapdash and cursory as mine…)

A taxonomy is, in its essence, nothing more or less than a system of sorting or classifying. To my mind, Bloom’s taxonomy has more of the feel of a folk taxonomy than a scientific taxonomy. For example, the folk classification of the large plants in a garden as trees, shrubs or flowers would be more than adequate for the average layperson. However, a botanist or gardener would probably require a more rigorous classification system using actual detailed scientific observations of the characteristics of the plants, rather than a handwaving “it’s a bit bushy” or “it looks tree-y”.

At first glance, it might seem obvious that creating is more cognitively demanding than (say) applying. But is it? How do we know? It seems to me that in order to accept this as a fact we need a sound model of how the human mind actually works. Is it always the case that creating always trumps applying? From my (admittedly limited) understanding of neuroscience, it seems to me that creating involves many brain processes and that these are currently poorly understood. The same can be said of the brain processes involved in applying. As a consequence, to place the two in any sort of cognitive hierarchy is, at best, premature.

The danger is that Bloom’s taxonomy is prejudicial in the sense that it assigns relative value to certain nebulously-defined types of thinking. As psychologist Robert J. Sternberg says, such theories “often do not have the clarity in epistemological status” that is required of a scientific taxonomy. So what we are left with is a folk taxonomy common among educational practitioners.

But how common? As Brenda Sugrue notes, even fans of Bloom’s taxonomy do not always agree on the level of a given learning objective: “it might be classified into either of the two lowest levels [ . . . ] or into any of the four highest levels [ . . . ] by different designers.” Sugrue argues that Bloom’s taxonomy:

was developed before we understood the cognitive processes involved in learning and performance. The categories or “levels” of Bloom’s taxonomy … are not supported by any research on learning. The only distinction that is supported by research is the distinction between declarative/conceptual knowledge … and procedural knowledge (which enables application or task performance).

It might seem, therefore, that possibly Bloom’s taxonomy is not even a folk taxonomy within the educational community, but rather it is simply a taxonomy of personal preference with regard to educational objectives.

David Morrison-Love makes the point that “the contribution made by Bloom’s Taxonomy cannot be underestimated, as a communication system derived from classifying different types of exam questions”; but goes on to say that  he does “not view the elements in Bloom’s Taxonomy as successive levels, but simply a collection of equally important intellectual processes I wish to promote and develop in learners; the challenge of which I control.”

Many of the authors cited propose alternative systems to replace Bloom’s taxonomy. At the moment, I am not sure whether any of these are worth considering.

However, the point of this blog post is to warn you that if that ubiquitous multicoloured triangle is flashed without a caveat on to a training screen near you, it could be an indication that the presenter has not done his or her homework, and that his or her assurances that what they say is based on  what ” research shows” may not be as rock solid as they might appear.

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