Benjamin Bloom
Operationalisation of educational objectives.
Organising educational objectives according to their cognitive complexity. This categorisation (taxonomy) may provide grounds upon which examiners can create a reliable procedure for assessing students and the outcomes of educational practice.
The above diagram presents the taxonomy of cognitive complexity (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation), within each of these cognitive levels a listing of application verbs is provided, further a set of task descriptors is provided to assist teachers.
He focused much of his research on the study of educational objectives and, ultimately, proposed that any given task favours one of three psychological domains: cognitive, affective, or psycho-motor. The cognitive domain deals with a person's ability to process and utilize (as a measure) information in a meaningful way. The affective domain relates to the attitudes and feelings that result from the learning process. Lastly, the psychomotor domain involves manipulative or physical skills.
Caleb Gattegno (1911–1988)
Learning and Effort
(Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caleb_Gattegno)
We keep in our minds a huge quantity of information simply because we have seen, heard, tasted, smelt or felt it. This ability is part of human nature. This is what enables us to walk about our town without getting lost, to ski or to read a book.
Gattegno proposed that we base education, not on memorisation which has a high energetic cost and is often unreliable, but on retention. The learning tools and techniques Gattegno proposed rely systematically on retention.
The Subordination of Teaching to Learning
Gattegno argued that for pedagogical actions to be effective, teaching should be subordinated to learning, which requires that as an absolute prerequisite teachers must understand how people learn. Rather than present facts for memorization, teachers construct challenges for students to conquer. If the student cannot conquer the challenge easily, the teacher does not tell the answer, but observes and asks questions to determine where the confusion lies, and what awareness needs to be triggered in the student.
Only Awareness is Educable
Gattegno found that only awareness is educable in human beings.
Gattegno suggests that learning takes place in four stages which can be described in terms of awareness.
The first stage consists in a single act of awareness: the realisation that there is something new to be explored. As long as I am unaware that there is something to be known, I cannot start to learn.
The second stage: As soon as I start to learn, I have to explore the situation in order to understand it. As I am not yet an expert in the field, I make many mistakes. These mistakes enable me to progress because by observing what happens and becoming aware of it I can adapt my attempts in relation to the feedback given by the environment. This stage ends when I know what I have to do, but I only succeed when I am wholly present in what I am doing.
The third stage is a transitional stage. At the beginning, I am able to do what I want if I pay attention at each instant. At the end of this stage I no longer need to pay attention: the new skill has become completely automatic and because it is automatic, I am free to give my attention to learning other things.
The fourth stage is that of transfer. For the rest of my life, what I have learnt can be used for all the new skills I may wish to acquire. When I learnt to run, I used the know-how I had acquired from learning to walk. Both of these, walking and running, were useful to me when I decided to learn cross-country skiing. Each skill remains available, except in the rare cases of accident or injury, for a lifetime.
----- This happened to me, the task was to look up Gardner, Bloom and DeBono, I got interested in the presence of knowledge, so I searched and placed some initial work on this blog.
Howard Gardner
Multiple intelligences is an idea that states that human beings have many different ways to learn and process information, or "intelligences." In 1999 Gardner lists eight intelligences as linguistic, logic-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily kinaesthetic, naturalist, interpersonal and intra-personal.
Educators take this dissection of intelligences and align educational tasks with them.
Others view this theoretical breakdown as an analysis that provides a guide to weakness to be developed.
Edward DeBono
The de bono Hats system (also known as "Six Hats" or "Six Thinking Hats") is a thinking tool for group discussion and individual thinking. Combined with the idea of parallel thinking which is associated with it, it provides a means for groups to think together more effectively, and a means to plan thinking processes in a detailed and cohesive way.
The premise of the method is that the human brain thinks in a number of distinct ways which can be identified, deliberately accessed and hence planned for use in a structured way allowing one to develop strategies for thinking about particular issues. Dr de Bono identifies six distinct states in which the brain can be "sensitised".
Six distinct states are identified and assigned a color:
- Information: (White) - considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
- Emotions (Red) - instinctive gut reaction or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification)
- Bad points judgment (Black) - logic applied to identifying flaws or barriers, seeking mismatch
- Good points judgment (Yellow) - logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony
- Creativity (Green) - statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes
- Thinking (Blue) - thinking about thinking
Having identified the six states that can be accessed, distinct programs can be created, these are sequences of hats which encompass and structure the thinking process toward a distinct goal. A number of these are included in the materials provided to support the franchised training of the six hats method; however it is often necessary to adapt them to suit an individual purpose. Also, programs are often "emergent" which is to say that the group might plan the first few hats then the facilitator will see what seems to be the right way to go.
Sequences always begin and end with a blue hat; the group agrees together how they will think, then they do the thinking, then they evaluate the outcomes of that thinking and what they should do next. Sequences (and indeed hats) may be used by individuals working alone or in groups.
Example programs
- Initial Ideas - Blue, White, Green
- Choosing between alternatives - Blue, White, Green, Yellow, Black, Red
- Identifying Solutions - Blue, White, Black, Green
- Quick Feedback - Blue, Black, Green, White
- Strategic Planning - Blue, Yellow, Black, White
- Process Improvement - Blue, White, (Other peoples views) Yellow, Black, Green, Red
- Solving Problems - Blue, White, Green, Red, Yellow, Black
- Performance Review - Blue, Red, White, Yellow, Black, Green
