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. (more…)