What does educational reform mean to you? In the 1950’s and 60’s it meant the end of racially segregated schools in America. Since then, it has represented curriculum reform, teacher compensation reform, teacher accountability reform, parent choice reform, and about a dozen additional reforms. But regardless the teacher, topic, or technology, there is a methodology that all teachers are taught which needs to be addressed if we are to have sense-making reform. This methodology is known as Bloom’s Taxonomy. In 1956, Benjamin Bloom proposed the six types of learning objectives that can be created for learners, and this limited framework provides the foundational skeleton for all of education and testing. This framework was created by talking to teachers and testers to get their lists of classroom objectives, to then group these objectives into six buckets. But as anyone in business understands, the first step in a successful change project is to know who your stakeholders are. Bloom talked to the stakeholders of teachers and testers to understand what they were trying to do, before organizing their classroom objectives into six buckets. Can you identify the missing stakeholder? Why not also ask the learners for what they were trying to do?
Educational reform is not stalled due to a lack of technology or funding, but due to the misalignment between our Industrial-age models for how to learn, and the mind’s innate patterns for learning and explaining. When educational reform means sense-making reform, then we will know we are finally serious about moving past the Industrial Age, and into an age where “making students first” means that the learners are the primary stakeholder in the change project. Aligning the learner’s sense-making ability with the learning activities will require us to replace Bloom’s Taxonomy with a framework that is aligned with what the learners are trying to do, not what the teachers in 1956 were trying to do. To make this kind of change will take serious leadership and commitment, but the result will move the classroom out of the Industrial Age and into the Explanation Age.
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