Relevant Learning: New Kinds of Goals

In a previous issue of the Educator, we saw that the hopes and dreams of Castleton’s educators include some lofty aspirations for students. The challenge comes in designing a course in a way that leads to those “big dream” aspirations. 

Dee Fink, from whose book Creating Significant Learning Experiences (2013) the big dream activity is taken, advises rethinking traditional learning goals.  Specifically, he counsels that instructors consider adding what are sometimes unfamiliar kinds of learning goals to supplement those that we traditionally expect to find in a college course.

When writing goals and learning outcomes for a course, it is often helpful to consult a learning taxonomy.  A learning taxonomy is a categorized list of very specific action verbs that you can use to write goals and learning outcomes. Selecting specific verbs helps to clarify what you hope students will be able to do when they have completed your course. These verbs are usually listed in categories of similar, but slightly different actions that students will be able to take.

Probably the two most prominent course design taxonomies are Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Taxonomy of Significant Learning developed by Fink. There’s no shortage of website pages with advice on writing effective goals and learning outcomes.  This guide from the University of Colorado provides some good starting points and more on Bloom’s Taxonomy.  

Bloom’s Taxonomy

Bloom’s Taxonomy is based on the work of Benjamin Bloom and collaborators presented in  Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956).  Although the collaborators produced several different taxonomies, Bloom’s taxonomy of the “cognitive domain” tends to get exclusive attention. In its 2001 update by educational psychologists, it organizes specific action verbs into six categories:

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The taxonomy is usually presented as a hierarchy ranging from goals that are thought to be easier to obtain (on the bottom) to more complex and challenging ones that build on that foundation.  Learners begin by committing basic knowledge to memory.  As they understand this knowledge better, they are able to apply it in new situations or to solve novel problems.  The taxonomy suggests that the deepest learning has happened when learners can think critically about what they have learned or use it to create new knowledge.   

A taxonomy like this is useful for clarifying the kind of learning that will take place in a course.  For example, an early course in a major might be designed to impart foundational knowledge; its goals may emphasize what the instructor wants her students to remember and understand.  To assure that students learn the material deeply, however, the course may also include opportunities for students to apply that knowledge or even start to think critically about it.  These activities can be raised to the level of learning objectives and clarified as outcomes in the course.

Taxonomy of Significant Learning

In Creating Significant Learning Experiences Dee Fink describes how expectations about college learning often extend beyond the merely “cognitive” domain of Bloom’s taxonomy. In any variety of disciplines, professors aspire to support student development of skills and dispositions ranging from communication to collaboration, cultural awareness to leadership. Fink argues that professors should explicitly embrace those aspirations because they will make the course content relevant and “significant” for their students, increasing student engagement and motivation to learn.

Fink developed his Taxonomy of Significant Learning as the centerpiece of his “integrated” approach to course design. It includes the familiar knowing, understanding and applying goals of Bloom’s taxonomy, but it provides a further vision for the integration of learning with students lived experiences.

Image source: Laura Dahl on Flickr

Fink urges instructors to consider how students will integrate this new knowledge with what they already know and care about, while, in the process, working intentionally to expand those cares and concerns.  The taxonomy explicitly targets what Fink calls the “human dimension”, or how this learning gives insight into the life of the student or the lives of others.  And finally, Fink urges us to include opportunities to teach students how to learn and develop skills that they can take with them to their next course. For more information on the taxonomy, this page from the University of Buffalo Office of Curriculum, Assessment and Teaching Transformation, is a good place to start.

In his course design workshops, Fink directed participants to identify a specific goal for each area of the taxonomy and address  that goal as part of the course learning outcomes.  This is the central insight here.  Most instructors will include some notice or even instruction toward these ideas, but it is often far subordinate to the otherwise traditional course goals we find associated with the cognitive dimensions of Bloom’s Taxonomy.  Fink advises elevating this instruction in integration, caring, the human dimension, and learning how to learn, to the importance of course goals.  This includes raising the content, activities and assessment to the consistent practices of the course. The art of integrated course design comes in figuring out how to make these goals an important part of the learning in the course.

By Chris Boettcher

Chris Boettcher, is the inaugural Director of the Castleton Center for Teaching and Learning and Professor of English.

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