My Journal for Alan.

“Today, by way of introduction, I want to prepare the ground for what will occupy us during the next few days. Education is very much in the news today, and many people connected with the education of the young are discussing the need for reform. Many different views are expressed – often with considerable enthusiasm – about how education should undergo a change, a renewal. And yet, when hearing the various views upon the subject, one cannot help feeling a certain trepidation, because it is difficult to see how such different views could ever lead to some kind of unity and common purpose – especially since each point of view claims to be the only valid one.”

Dr R. Steiner – Dornach, April 15, 1923

Eighty three years later and the education debate goes on with continuing theories and changes. Constructivism is the buzz word now but one has to wonder what it will be even ten years from now. It’s a bit like child-rearing methods through the ages, from the ultra strict regimes of the past, to the preserve-their-self-esteem-at-all-costs philosophy of the present day.

I’ve just been looking up the word “taxonomy” in my pocket Oxford dictionary so that the words Blooms Taxonomy won’t be as daunting, or meaningless for that matter. I know they represent something very useful and display incredible thinking capacities but “taxonomy”? Anyway, according to my dictionary it means: classification of living and extinct organisms. Huh? Its from the Greek word taxis meaning arrangement and noma meaning distribution. Ah, BUT… this is a Cognitive Taxonomy and that’s different. Here is one explanation.

Bloom's Taxonomy *

Benjamin Bloom created this taxonomy for categorizing level of abstraction of questions that commonly occur in educational settings. The taxonomy provides a useful structure in which to categorize test questions, since professors will characteristically ask questions within particular levels, and if you can determine the levels of questions that will appear on your exams, you will be able to study using appropriate strategies.

.This is an easy-to-understand graph of this particular taxonomy.


I went on the net to try and get an idea of what inspired Bloom’s great interest in education. I did not have much luck with that but I did find a site written by a previous student of Bloom who was extremely inspired by him. He wrote pages about the man and it at least gave me a slight inkling of Bloom’s personality. He was quite short for a man – 5’5”- in the U.S. measurement and full of life and enthusiasm. In anthroposophical terms this could indicate a rather choleric temperament which would give rise to someone who believed in action. Certainly all these verbs in the taxonomy would agree with that!

The educational environment in the 1950’s had a curriculum evaluation system that compared the students’ achievements with each other. It was taken for granted that some students would get A’s and B’s but most would get C’s – a basic fact of life. Students were given a chunk of information to learn and a time frame to learn it in with no regard for the individual learning rates of the students. Bloom felt that this needed to be addressed. He felt that if the information was processed in a series of stages with a variety of structured processes to suit each stage and a more flexible time frame, then all students would be given the opportunity to succeed. By using the stages of remembering/understanding, application, analysing, creating and finally evaluating the information each student would make the information their own. It is a very active way of learning which most students enjoy as long as the content is relevant to them.

As a teacher Benjamin Bloom appears to have been very constructivist in his approach, getting his uni students to be active rather than just expecting them to limply absorb a barrage of information. During student presentations he seems to have been very supportive even when the presentations fell flat, earning the site-writer’s undying gratitude as it was his presentation that fell flat. Apparently Bloom seized the opportunity to make that experience an opportunity for higher learning for everyone in the room rather than heaping scorn on his student’s head.

Do I apply his format to my teaching in Class One? Well no, not all of it. Certainly the Remember/ Understand category comes into play, as does Apply and Create. We do not however ask students under the age of 12 years old to analyse or evaluate as it is not considered developmentally appropriate to use those aspects of thinking at such a young age in Steiner schools.


Well hello again, (16/9/06) a week after Tony’s Saturday with us. No wonder I would not be asking Year One for analysing and evaluation of information, apparently it is usually expected of Year 12 students. Tony’s day was full of information, however I felt that it was mainly aimed at the high school spectrum of development. Some of the things he said made things more clear to me, one thing in particular was “ the theory follows the deed.” It might have been glaringly obvious to everyone else but I’ve been under the impression that these theories of student development and learning have been thought up as a kind of random experiment and then applied as a sort of desperate measure to remedy the ongoing education problem. It makes a lot more sense to realise that it has been observation of developmental behaviour that has lead to various experiments and thus the theories explaining the behaviour.

Isn’t teaching an endlessly complex and fascinating subject? It is also a terribly, frighteningly responsible job. Every day we are faced with a room full of diverse, complicated and ever-changing young people who are the products of a whole range of influences, from the very positive to the quite horrific. Regardless of what these influences may be we set to work to bring the world to them in a way that they can comprehend and find interesting enough to do their own reflection on and research about. Some of us are more successful than others in this task. Some people are “born teachers” - from the very beginning they have had the ability to go into a classroom and inspire the children within. Most of us have the Initiation from Hell to go through before we can even control the students long enough to teach them.

What makes a good teacher? We all have memories of our own experiences as a student. I remember a very kind teacher I had in class one who defended me in class. Another gave permission to the school bullies to beat me up and indeed gave me the cane himself as a bit of stress relief. I can remember that same teacher giving us lengths of coloured paper to stick in our books but for the life of me I never knew why and I still haven’t worked it out. I do not think he would make it onto Hattie’s expert teacher list. In high school we had a terrifying history teacher with laser eyes who made it dangerous to not learn. He was not constructivist in the slightest, just gave us pages of information, but he knew his subject inside out and was able to make it interesting- we all got good marks in history. The high degree of discipline he had meant that no-one ever misbehaved. He was well-respected but not loved. Then there were the other teachers who probably knew their subject but presented it very boringly. Just knowing one’s subject well does not mean that one can teach it well. There are many very learned people who should never set foot in a classroom to teach. So what skills do we need to take on the daunting, strangely addictive task of educating children? Tony asked us why we became teachers. It was odd but I had actually never seriously asked myself that question before, I still find it hard to put into words. But it is totally addictive and equally terrifying. As for skills… Being a teacher in a Steiner School means that I refer to the lectures given by Rudolf Steiner for most of my instruction and understanding of child development. In his book Practical Advice for Teachers he had this to say about teachers and the qualities they should have:

Closing Words: “Firstly the teacher must see to it that he influences and works upon his pupils – in a wider sense - by letting the spirit flow through his whole being as a teacher, and also in the details of his work, how he utters each single word, or develops each individual concept or feeling. The teacher must be a man of initiative. He must never be careless or lazy; at every moment he must stand in full consciousness of what he is doing in the school and how he behaves to the children. This is the first principle. The teacher must be a man of initiative in everything that he does, great and small.

Secondly, we as teachers must be interested in everything that is going on in the world and in all that concerns mankind. All that is happening in the outside world and in the life of men must arouse our interest. We should also be able to enter into all the concerns of every individual child in our care. The teacher should be one who is interested in the being of the whole world and of humanity.

Thirdly, the teacher must be one who never makes a compromise in his heart and mind with what is untrue. The teacher must be one who is true in the depths of his being. He must never compromise with untruth, for if he did so we should see how through many channels untruth would find its way into our teaching, especially in the way we present our subjects.

And now something that is more easily said than done; the teacher must never get stale or grow sour. Cherish a mood of soul which is fresh and healthy!"


These are by no means the only suggestions he ever made about teachers’ qualities, they are dotted throughout a lot of his books, sometimes in unexpected places. While this list is relatively brief it manages to cover the attributes that an “expert” teacher should try to attain. I’ve gone through Hattie’s list and will now attempt to rate myself accordingly.

A1. I’ve had the occasional flash of success with this but I need to keep working at it.

A2. I think I have the right attitude in that I always look at the individual’s problems and try to sort them out but sometimes one needs to try a few solutions before one finds the right one, in which case I’ve just partially flunked A3.

A4. My lesson plans exist on paper as well as in my head but never in much detail. Sometimes I don’t accomplish the aim of the lesson because occasionally something else has arisen from the lesson that we have explored instead.
B5,6,7, no, still just experienced level teacher material here.
C8,9,10, still a long way to go.
D11,12, at last, two areas that I feel pretty good about.
E13, at the tender age of 7 years old my particular students have not developed some of the qualities I'm meant to have engendered in them but most of them have developed self-regulation as far as their previously frequent tantrum throwing episodes go. They just don't bother any more. Phew!
E14, not yet but I'll develop this one as my class get older.
E15 &16 Time will tell.

And the education debate goes on while teachers everywhere try to do what they can to make school a useful place in the eyes of the students and their families. Everyone has something to say.
Glasser and his theory of choice: children need a sense of place where they can feel safe and comfortable to learn in.
They need to feel that they are understood, welcomed and that they belong to the society of their classmates.
They need a certain amount of freedom to learn in, perhaps choices that they can make in a learning situation.
They need a sense of power
And they need to express their sense of fun and see that their teacher has that within them as well.