April Aumick
Benjamin Bloom
Benjamin Bloom was not a very big man, but the contributions he made in the field of education were enormous. Born in 1913 in Lansford, Pennsylvania he received his bachelor’s and master’s degree by 1935. He then went on to get his Ph.D. at the age of 29. He served as an advisor to many nations and he earned the Charles H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor award.
Elliot Eisner was one of Benjamin Bloom’s students in the education department of the University of Chicago. The aim if the course he was in was “to try to understand the kinds of questions that might be asked about the field of education and to explore the various ways in which those questions might be asked” (Eisner, 1). One of the main topics in this class was probability. Instead of standing in front of the class Benjamin Bloom allowed to the students to toss a coin and count the amount of times it landed on head and then on tails. They combined this information to figure out the outcome, which was a bell-shaped curve. The point this shows is that Benjamin Bloom wanted to take the time to demonstraight probability instead of just having them listen to him lecture. Bloom was a great teacher because he took the time and was committed to teaching the process of education.
Bloom and his mentor Ralph Tyler worked together to focus on the “operationalizaton of educational objectives”, “which was a way to develop specifications through which educational objectives could be organized” (Eisner, 2). They never quite made it that far but what they did come up with was the Taxonomy of educational objectives: Handout 1, the cognitive domain. This domain focuses on being able to order the cognitive operations into six different levels. “What Bloom wanted to reveal was what students were thinking about when teachers were teaching, because he recognized that it was what students were experiencing that ultimately mattered (Eisner, 3).
Benjamin Bloom cared and paid close attention to the environment and that influenced him to establish the Head Start Program in the US. He did not care about grades what he cared about was what they achieved and learned. This in turn helped the children achieve the goals they wanted to reach. He recognized there were individual differences among students and it was important to him to accommodate all of these differences. “By conceiving of the curriculum as a way to promote learning if organized sequentially and if supported to achieve educational forms of instruction and variability in time, all students could be helped to achieve educational goals” (Eisner, 5).
That last quote to me sums up all of his work. He was a great man who cared about the students and he wanted to help them learn. He studied hard and long to develop a strategy that will help teachers and help students benefit from the learning experience.