Small Teaching. James M. Lang

Part I Knowledge

      Imagine the media storm that erupted in 1956 upon the publication of an educational book with the attention-grabbing title of Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals, Handbook I: Cognitive Domain. The author of this spine tingler was psychologist Benjamin Bloom, who sought to articulate a set of objectives that teachers could use to guide their instructional activities. In spite of its eye-glazing title, the book's content ultimately became a sacred text for educational theorists and administrators everywhere, giving them both a conceptual framework and a vocabulary to articulate what they expected learners could achieve in their classrooms. The taxonomy that Bloom created contains six major categories: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. A quick glance over the six categories would suggest that they follow a progression from lower to higher orders of complexity, from a static possession of knowledge to more creative forms of thinking in the categories of synthesis and evaluation. Indeed, the taxonomy is often depicted in the shape of a pyramid, with knowledge at the bottom and evaluation or creation at the apex.

Unfortunately, this visual image of Bloom's taxonomy as a pyramid, which all teachers have likely encountered at some point in their lives, has led many higher education instructors to view Bloom's categories in a distorted way. When you think of a pyramid, after all, where do you want to be? At the top, of course. Nobody wants to be down on the bottom row of a pyramid, crushed by the weight of the rising layers, unable to reach for the cognitive stars. So some instructors seem to believe that the learning of facts or concepts, or helping students remember facts and concepts—or even procedures or basic skills—falls beneath them; they are interested only in higher order activities like critical thinking or making judgments or creating new knowledge. College instructors seem especially prone to this desire to hop over the bottom layer of the pyramid—or, more charitably, to assume either that elementary and secondary educators should have helped students learn how to remember things or that students should master knowledge outside of class and class time can be exclusively devoted to higher cognitive activities. In recent years such instructors have used a new argument to justify their dismissal of the knowledge category of Bloom's taxonomy: the omnipresence of search engines. Why should we bother to help students remember facts, so this argument runs, when all of the facts of the entire world are available to them at the touch of a fingertip? Facts now come in the form of smartphones. Let the Internet provide students with the facts, and we will instead focus our energies on the higher cognitive activities that make use of those facts.

Appealing though it might be to offload the responsibility for teaching our students basic knowledge to their elementary school teachers or to Google^TM, the research of cognitive psychologists who study learning and the basic study habits of most students suggest that we cannot do this. One of our first and most important tasks as teachers is to help students develop a rich body of knowledge in our content areas—without doing so, we diminish considerably their ability to engage in cognitive activities like thinking and evaluating and creating. As cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham has argued, you can't think creatively about information unless you have information in your head to think about. “Research from cognitive science has shown,” he explains, “that the sorts of skills that teachers want for their students—such as the ability to analyze and think critically—require extensive factual knowledge” (Willingham 2014, p. 25). We have to know things, in other words, to think critically about them. Without any information readily available to use in our brains, we tend to see new facts (from our Internet searches) in isolated, noncontextual ways that lead to shallow thinking. Facts are related to other facts, and the more of those relationships we can see, the more we will prove capable of critical analysis and creative thinking. Students who don't bother to memorize anything will never get much beyond skating over the surface of a topic.

But the issue runs more deeply than this. When we learn new facts, we are building up mental structures that enable us to process and organize the next set of new facts more effectively. Knowledge is foundational: we won't have the structures in place to do deep thinking if we haven't spent time mastering a body of knowledge related to that thinking. The depiction of Bloom's taxonomy as a pyramid actually does acknowledge this important principle; one cannot get to the top levels of creative and critical thinking without a broad and solid foundation of knowledge beneath them. As Willingham puts it, “Thinking well requires knowing facts, and that's true not simply because you need something to think about. The very processes that teachers care most about—critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem-solving—are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment)” (Willingham 2014, p. 28). In his book Curious, Ian Leslie argues that such knowledge is “the hidden power” of our cognition (Leslie 2015, p. 121); the more of it we have, the more deeply we can think.

      As a simple illustration of the intertwinement of facts and thinking, consider the example of a lawyer who has to build an argument over the course of a trial, responding on short notice to witnesses or actions by the judge. We might think about a lawyer who works skillfully in such a situation as an adept and creative thinker, one who can respond quickly on her feet and construct arguments with facility. But if we listen to her making those arguments, we are likely to hear lots and lots of facts: legal principles, examples from other famous cases, statements from other witnesses, and so on. Undoubtedly, the lawyer in this case demonstrates complex cognitive and creative skills in building arguments from facts, but no such thinking will arise without those facts. More important, the lawyer's gradual mastery of a body of facts, over the course of years of study and legal practice, enables her to take what she is encountering in this trial and invest it with meaning by connecting it with previous cases and trials, thus better preparing her for her next round of critical thinking in the courtroom. Likewise, I know that if I ask students to think critically about the meaning of a Romantic poem in my literature survey course, the student with a deep factual knowledge of the historical context in which it was written will offer me a better analysis than the one who just eyeballs it and Googles^TM a few facts at random. We need factual material in our memory for every cognitive skill we might want to teach our students.

We should not assume that students are either willing or capable of mastering such foundational knowledge on their own, in their study and learning outside of the classroom. In fact, research on student learning strategies suggests that students typically make poor choices when they attempt to learn new information—and that they make those choices even when they know better. Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, the authors of Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, describe a fascinating experiment in which students were given two different strategies for learning how to identify characteristics of the work of different painters: studying the paintings either in similar groups (i.e., massed studying) or all mixed together (i.e., interleaved studying). The students who studied the paintings in interleaved fashion performed better on tests they took after their study periods—but this did not seem to make a difference in how they thought about studying, as the authors explain: “Despite