Summary of the Article: Benjamin Bloom by Elliot W. Eisner
Although Benjamin Bloom was not a physically large man his impact on the field of education was immense. He was born in 1913 and died in 1999 after earning bachelor, master, and doctoral degrees and serving positions on many boards, primarily in Chicago. Although, he was known all over the world for his incredible work and instruction on how people learn.
As a teacher, Bloom wanted people to understand what topics that they wanted their curriculum to cover and how to ask the right questions. He made an impression on the author about the importance of the use of statistics as long as the context was presented as well.
Bloom worked with Ralph W. Tyler, his mentor, while in Chicago on organizing his educational objectives into a book. They developed six levels of increasing difficulty that the students must proceed through sequentially. After putting his cognitive taxonomy together he began working with Broder studying what college students were thinking about when the teachers were lecturing. This is where he began using the “think-alouds” to instantly retrieve this information.
Bloom’s theories on mastery learning are very personal for me, since I believe that everyone should be expected to reach the same attainable goals. Nevertheless, I feel that as educators we should leave the “bar” alone and concentrate on teaching the curriculum to help our students succeed continually remembering this can not be done in exactly the same amount of time but.
Bloom discussed how home life can have positive and negative effects on development that have nothing to do with heredity. He believed that it should be the educator’s mission to provide an optimistic environment where everyone would have the possibility to thrive. One of Bloom’s students studied differences in siblings and found that the parents treated each child differently and had different expectations, which impacted their performance.
One of Bloom’s most important studies found that by the age of 7 the academic position was determined and the only way to change it was through effective teaching. This included changing the view of education from a race model to the attainment of goals. Bloom also stressed the idea of looking at more than just test scores to determine children’s’ intelligence.
I think that Bloom have many great ideas that are going to be discussed and used for centuries.