Education: Learning Must Extend Beyond Knowledge For Sustainable Performance Improvement

If you are an educator whether in the K-16 schools or corporate training, can you answer the following three questions:

Who is Krathwohl?

Who is Dave?

And why is that important to me as a teacher or a trainer?

Krathwohl is an educational researcher who worked with Bloom and developed the Affective Taxonomy published in 1964. (NOTE: Bloom and his colleagues indentified the 3 learning domains of affective, cognitive and psychomotor and spent considerable time constructing what is now known as the Bloom Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956) around the cognitive learning domain.)

The Affective taxonomy or classification in ascending order consisted of:

Receiving

Responding

Valuing

Organizing and Conceptulizing

Characterising by Value or Value Concept

Dave in 1975 suggested a taxonomy based upon Bloom's and others earlier works specific to the psychomotor domain. His efforts led to the following:

Imitation

Manipulation

Precision

Articulation

Naturalisation

The reason it is important is that the initial research by Bloom and his colleagues suggested that all three domains must work together in tandem to maximize the effectiveness of learning. When there is emphasis on only one domain, then sustainable learning will not happen.

Some additional questions to consider:

As an educator, teacher or trainer, do you agree that Bloom's work is important to learning?

Do you construct lesson plans or training sessions based upon all 6 categories within Bloom's educational objectives?

Are your lesson plans and instructional strategies reflective of all 3 domains or of just the cognitive domain?

Are you frustrated by the lack of academic progress or results your students or participants are making when compared to your daily efforts?

Are you building the desire or the affective learning domain?

Are your actions intentionally or unintentionally shutting down the affective or psycho motor domains?

After working with the performance of young people for the last 10 years and with adults for over 25 years, I can honestly state that no one wants to be a performance failure. What we as educators or trainers need to do is to ensure that we unite all 3 domains for true sustainable performance improvement.