Thinking as Legitimate Participation in Schooling
Benjamin Bloom, a psychiatrist from Pennsylvania, is credited with creating one of the most famous taxonomies in public education, Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognitive Behaviors, in 1956.
Others have pointed out the richness of this epoch in ideas exploring human development. Abraham Maslow published his Human Needs in 1954. Piaget brought to fruition his biological model of the development of consciousness in childhood. Jerome Bruner was bringing Vygotsky’s social psychology from a thirty year deep freeze in Russia to the English speaking world.
Codifying cognitive learning behaviors as legitimate teaching objectives was radical at the time, though almost old hat today. School was a place to teach knowledge, not thinking and learning. Pavlov’s stimulus-response model rooted in reward and punishment was as pervasive in school practices as gold stars, dunce caps, honor rolls, and graduation ceremonies. Sound familiar?
Insinuating that thinking could be taught lit a fuse that created an explosion still reverberating in 2022. Educators continue to mine Bloom’s taxonomy as we speak to discern the delicate interconnections among underlying hybrid cognitive behaviors powering learning and consciousness.
Bloom’s fundamental insight has not changed: Powerful learning is not the consequence of reward and punishment. Learning is the residue of recognizable, complex, recurring cognitive work, which can be taught. Each of us constructs our own conceptual and episodic knowledge as the work of a lifetime. We must do our own work. Only in school can we cheat and get credit for holes in our head.
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Bloom identified three lower-order and three higher-order clusters of behaviors. Lower-order cognition is arguably demonstrated today by learning machines and neural networks, the stuff of fiction in the 1950s. Lower-order thinking allows humans to know things, facts, bits and pieces; to understand and infer relationships among the pieces (comprehension); and to use knowledge and understanding to act in and on the world (application).
Higher-order thinking transforms the products of lower-order work and frees consciousness from constraints of time and space. Thoughts and their contents are stopped in time, taken apart, and reassembled. New thoughts are made. Predictions about objects and occurrences in the future are formulated with probabilities of materializing. Inventions are designed and developed. Verdicts are delivered.
Discerning canonical patterns in relevant information, inferring relevance, partitioning sections of cause-effect chains from contingent relationships, thematizing, categorizing, combining information in provisional ways, generating innovative structures, one of a kind… HOT stuff.
Critical thinking (HOTs) is the aim, and not the instrument, of instruction, teachers are better able to judge how and when to intervene in cognitive learning activity. The assessment application of Bloom was a natural part of supporting the learner. The reciprocity between cognitive behaviors and concrete learning activity is empowering for both learners and teachers. The proof is in the pudding.
When higher-order thinking is understood as voluntary, highly motivated, self-interested work, the autonomous model of literacy becomes absurd, like an app running in the background on a cell phone.
There is nothing magical, nothing automatic, nothing autonomous happening. It’s very real and human. Critical thinking is unleashed and sharpened over years of shared experiences in the consciousness of an authentic learning/knowing agent occupying and growing in an ideological space that privileges self-investment in cultural practices produced and reproduced in apprenticeships in formal schools through legitimate peripheral participation.1
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1991-98963-000