Depth of Understanding

by Julia Schwarz

I had a bit of an epiphany earlier this year when I was observing some of the subject tutors on our International Foundation Programme. I was trying to conduct some research into engagement, scaffolding and Bloom’s Taxonomy when I realised that I was asking the wrong questions. While I was looking at how subject tutors used scaffolding in line with Bloom’s Taxonomy, the tutors scaffolded for depth and complexity of understanding.

It is a subtle difference, perhaps best explained by Daisy Christodoulou (2024), a former secondary school teacher who has written widely about education and whose critique of the progression statement (what we’d call Intended Learning Outcome) discusses how being able to “infer characters’ emotions from explicit details in the text” is a different skill when the text under consideration is Winnie the Pooh rather than Pride and Prejudice. Both tasks might sit on the same level of Bloom’s Taxonomy, but one is considerably more complex than the other.

One of the problems with Bloom’s Taxonomy is the hierarchical structure which has been commonly assigned to it as shown below. This is not present in the original text (Bloom, 1956) and I have previously blogged about possible alternative formats (Bloom’s Bloom – down with the hierarchy!) and about the role of understanding within the hierarchy (Bloom’s second tier).  

 

Since reflecting on my experiences during my research, I have come to the conclusion that understanding is not just key to achieving what are commonly called ‘higher order’ thinking skills. I believe that understanding tops those skills. Yes, we need knowledge and understanding to be able to analyse and synthesise, but we don’t understand in order to analyse and synthesise; we analyse and synthesise in order to understand. This is why my latest visualisation of Bloom’s Taxonomy places knowledge and understanding at the top of the hierarchy.

The realisation that our students’ overarching aim is to develop and communicate depth of understanding, and the fact that this depth becomes increasingly complex throughout the course of their studies, has profoundly impacted my teaching. It has meant that I have re-evaluated the role knowledge-building activities, such as reading and listening, play for our students and I now heavily prioritise meaning over form, content over structure and students over materials.

This means that I now ensure that my students get the time needed to practise activities which are useful in developing depth of understanding. When I teach reading strategies, I ensure that they get plenty of time to try out and discuss different strategies which help them to fully understand a text and when I teach notetaking, I ensure that they get plenty of time to try out new techniques for notetaking and analyse them in terms of their usefulness for criticality.

The role of the teacher

In order to facilitate this, the biggest change has been to my role as the teacher. In the past, the principles of the Communicative Language Classroom taught me to be a ‘guide on the side’ (King, 1993) or ‘meddler in the middle’ (McWilliam, 2009) rather than a ‘sage on the stage’. This meant that it was not my job to explain things. Instead, I spent far too much time getting students to where they needed to be in order to complete the activities above. Much of the lesson was wasted on students working out what they were supposed to learn before being able to apply their learning.

I now have no qualms guiding the students through a text or explaining key concepts or strategies. Not only do good explanations save time, they also give students confidence in their understanding and prevent misconceptions. This doesn’t mean that I do all the talking. I ask questions wherever I can. But it is my questioning which guides the students, and sometimes it is necessary to explain first and then check for understanding (Sherrington, 2020).

Reading

Let me take reading strategies as an example. Early EAP practitioners responded to the large amount of reading students are required to do by teaching techniques for increased reading speed (Jordan, 2001). While EAP has moved away from general speed-reading techniques, in my opinion there is still too much emphasis on speeding up the process through techniques like skimming and scanning, which my students generally know about already. I have found that these strategies often give my students the sense that there must be a secret to reading faster which they haven’t quite mastered yet, as despite all the skimming and scanning they do, they still don’t understand what they read.

Instead, I focus on slowing down the process. We try strategies like predicting from the title and abstract as a whole class so that students can see that it is not just ok but necessary to spend some time on this part of the reading process. I use my own experience of learning English as a second language to home in on vocabulary and grammar structures the students might struggle with and make sure the students really understand what they are reading. And I get my students to frequently reflect on what they are doing, on its usefulness and on how they might apply it to their future reading.

Writing

When working with samples, e.g. when we want to look at how different students from previous cohorts have structured their paragraphs and what we can learn from them, it is important to remember that language is a way to convey meaning. There is no point in looking at structure before considering the content being conveyed. So now we spend some time activating schemata before even looking at the samples. We discuss what the students would like to say about a topic before looking at what the samples say about it. It is only then that we consider how the samples do this and what effect different structures have on the reader.

More importantly, to me the status of writing has changed. Writing has two important roles to play: One is to help students develop depth of understanding (Hunt, 2010), the other is to communicate depth of understanding. We often focus on the latter in EAP classes, as well as more superficial criteria which have come from past efforts in rhetorical and genre analysis. Writing to develop depth of understanding involves a level of discomfort which the students like to avoid. Livingstone (2024) describes this well in an article in which she laments the fact that even PhD students prefer to sidestep their discomfort by asking AI for help. I have not found a way to prevent this, but I feel that re-evaluating my own priorities is a good first step in the right direction.

The effect on the students

When I originally conducted the research mentioned above, my focus was on engagement. I was amazed at how engaged the students were across subjects. Since changing my priorities in my own classes, I have witnessed a similar effect among my students, who visibly enjoy their classes more and generally appear to leave happier. It does take time, both in class and in preparation. I spend much more time preparing for reading and listening activities, as I analyse texts for stumbling blocks and consider how best to help students remove these. In class, I am reminded of another blog post I wrote in my personal blog: ‘More Haste Less Speed’. We may spend longer on each text or activity, but the times when I feel like I may have covered a lot but the students leave with little are becoming increasingly fewer.

I believe that the move away from fragmented aims which are influenced by a variety of theoretical frameworks from Bloom’s Taxonomy to genre analysis and towards a focus on one overarching aim has given me a clarity which makes me a better teacher and my students better members of their academic community.

 

References:

Armstrong, P. (2010). Bloom’s Taxonomy. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Available at: https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/ [Accessed 10 October 2024]

Bloom, B. S. (1956) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay

Christodoulou, D. (2024) ‘The tyranny of the progression statement.’ No More Marking, 28 February, Available at: https://substack.nomoremarking.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-progression-statement [Accessed 9 October 2024]

Hunt, L. (2010) ‘How Writing Leads to Thinking’. Perspectives on History. Available at: https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/how-writing-leads-to-thinking-february-2010/ [Accessed 9 October 2024]

Jordan, R.R. (2001) ‘A history of English for Academic Purposes (EAP): From Small Beginnings’, In: G. Sánchez (ed.) Present and Future Trends in TEFL, Editorial Universidad de Almería, pp. 169-194

King, A. (1993) ‘From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side’, College Teaching, 41(1), pp. 30-35

Livingstone, V. (2024) ‘I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT’. Time. Available at: https://time.com/7026050/chatgpt-quit-teaching-ai-essay/?fbclid=IwY2xjawFzRC5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHTZBMvdho4QA8LumO83UzsXIpn1leWE0bZ9VxWgNpz_rM4bQRk18_zHUQw_aem_1_xkaDnHUQdMhbqgLPFcsg [Accessed 9 October 2024]

McWilliam, E. (2009) ‘Teaching for Creativity: from Sage to Guide to Meddler’, Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 29(3), pp. 281-293

Sherrington, T. (2020) ‘Deeper Learning for All — 5 Things to Do More of.’ Teacherhead, 18 January, Available at: https://teacherhead.com/2020/01/18/deeper-learning-for-all-five-things-to-do-more-of/ [Accessed 9 October 2024]