Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy

Pyramids.  Several ancient cultures built them and ever since we’ve been wondering why and how.  The conspiracy theories abound, most primarily focusing on space aliens.  But today’s post isn’t about physical pyramids and I don’t have any educational space alien conspiracy theories to share.  What today’s post is really about is pyramids of educational theory.  The pyramid shape is symbolic; it indicates that you must first have a firm grasp of the lower levels in order to achieve the higher levels.  In other words, a person would move up the pyramid level by level.  A few examples of theories we organize into pyramids are Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Bloom’s Taxonomy, and the tenets of Environmental Education.  Today I’ll be focusing on Bloom’s and the tenets of EE in parallel.

Our educational theory has been evolving for years and years.  The levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy are levels of intellectual complexity.  In 2001, Bloom’s traditional taxonomy got a slight make-over.  The names of the levels were changed to verbs and the top two levels were transposed.  When all was said and done the levels were as follows (starting at the bottom and working our way up): Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create.  By moving a student up each of the levels, a teacher can try to ensure that the student is processing the information more deeply in order to increase retention.  All ages are able to move up these levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy within the context of what they are learning.  For example, let’s take the topic of deforestation up Bloom’s Taxonomy at a high school cognitive level.  Remember: students can state the different negative impacts of deforestation.  Understand: students can explain why deforestation causes these negative impacts.  Apply: students can tie local or regional ecological issues to deforestation.  Analyze: students can contrast the ecological state of similar areas, one of which has experienced deforestation and one of which has not.  Evaluate: students can appraise the reasons for which the deforestation occurred.  Create: students can postulate what an area may look like ecologically if deforestation continues or if deforestation is reversed.

Environmental Education has a similar pyramid.  The tenets of EE are the outline of how EE strives to teach students.  The levels of the tenets of EE are as follows (starting at the bottom and working our way up): Awareness, Knowledge, Attitude, Skills, and Participation.  Much like Bloom’s, each of these levels represents a complexity; however unlike Bloom’s, students move up these levels at certain ages.  Awareness and Knowledge are the first steps a student takes, learning the basics of an EE topic.  Next they form their own attitudes and values about this topic.  In the final steps they learn the skills necessary to participate in that topic.  Awareness and knowledge take place at the lower grade school levels.  Attitude development begins in the upper grades and middle school levels.  Skills and participation don’t happen until middle school and high school level.

These educational pyramids are helpful for us; you could even say that they are ‘foundational’ to our work as educators.  They provide a framework for teachers to follow as they plan lessons, units, and whole curricula.

Fringed Polygala

At the Heart of the Arts

Usually the arts and the sciences are held in counterpoint to one another.  The arts provide the frills and the sciences the meat and potatoes.  No so I tell you!  The arts provide many surprisingly cognitive benefits.  Research has shown that music alone helps to sharpen many different parts of the brain and improve areas such as verbal learning, working memory, mathematical computation, reading ability, etc.  Visual arts help students use visual cues to encode information in their brain.  Movement based arts like dance help students keep their brain in peak physical condition so that they are able to better learn information.  Overall, the arts help to reach and engage students with a variety of different learning styles.

Environmental educators can incorporate the arts into their programs in many different ways.  Here are a few suggestions:

1. Use songs to help students understand ecological concepts (i.e. Seminole Wind and Paradise talk about habitat destruction; songs also help students to connect on an emotional level).

2. Use drawing to help students practice their observation skills.  Having students keep a nature journal is a fun and easy idea.

3. Acting and participating in living history programs can help students understand environmental and cultural events from a new perspective.

4. Older students can analyze environmental themes in theater productions, poetry, and song lyrics.

5. Younger students can use dance movements to mimic prairie grass, birds, animals, and water.

I’ve listed only five simple ideas; however, there are many more possibilities out there!  The arts are an important aspect  that educators need to take full advantage of.  Students who are involved and active in the arts are shown to be more cognitively adept, so why wouldn’t we as educators want to use this to our students’ advantage?

Beyond Ecophobia

Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education, by David Sobel, is a short and eloquent book on environmental education in our modern world.  I believe that the points that Sobel makes in his book echo the educational practices of brain-based education.  One of the primary tenets of brain-based education is that in order for something to be retained the information needs to make sense and have meaning to the student.  Now let’s apply this to Sobel’s idea of ecophobia.

Sobel defines ecophobia as “a fear of ecological problems and the natural world.  Fear of oil spills, rainforest destruction, whale hunting, acid rain, the ozone hole, and Lyme disease.  Fear of just being outside.”  Where does this fear stem from though?  How is it that we’re teaching our young children to fear the outdoors?  The answer: We’re attempting to teach children about environmental subjects they’re not cognitively ready to handle.

Before we teach children about major world issues, we need to introduce them to their own world first.  How will children understand the rainforest, if they don’t first understand the forest behind their own home?  By first experiencing their own environments, which they are able to interact with, children will be prepared to understand the wider world.  The start of environmental education is simply children playing in and interacting with nature.  From this they move onto learning about ecosystems that they can visit and experience firsthand.  This is the stage where sense and meaning begin to be attributed to environmental subjects.  Once students reach middle school and high school, they are better able to understand major environmental issues like rainforest deforestation and extinction.  To understand these larger scale issues, students will call on their previously learned knowledge of their own environments.

The take home message: let children be children, don’t burden them with problems that they can’t help solve.  As they grow and learn to appreciate nature they will want to take action to preserve the environment.

EE in the Classroom

One of the greatest challenges in the field of Environmental Education is incorporating it into the classroom.  With increasing pressure to teach to standards, many teachers struggle to find the time to include it in their classes.

A strategy that can be used to incorporate EE into the classroom is to teach thematic units.  A thematic unit can be taught in a single subject or can be integrated across many different subjects.  The idea is to use an engaging theme to help students learn.  In his book How the Brain Learns, David Sousa gives the perfect example of an EE thematic unit.  Entitled Water, Water Everywhere, the unit spans mathematics, science, language arts, social studies, music, and art.  All of the classes use the theme of water.  In math class, students are calculating how much water a household uses; in science class, students are learning about water use in plants; in social studies, students are looking at the economic impacts of drought; in music, students are learning songs about water and the sea; and in art, students are creating depictions of water.

Teaching thematic units can provide students with a deeper level of understanding about the subject they are studying.  Thematic units also help students to understand the interconnections of what they are studying.  Students who participate in the Water, Water Everywhere unit will understand that water has ecological, economical, and emotional aspects to it.  A unit such as this will help them to make deeper and more meaningful connections in their learning.

The Primacy-Recency Effect

Prepare to be amazed!  I am going to introduce to you a learning phenomenon called the primacy-recency effect.  Have you ever tried to memorize a list of information?  What parts do you remember best?  What parts don’t you remember at all?  In general, people tend to remember the beginning of the list and sort of remember the end of the list.  This is the primacy-recency effect.  So what does the primacy-recency effect look like when it’s applied to the larger scale of teaching and learning?

The primacy-recency effect tells us how to set-up our classroom time to maximize information retention in students.  During a 40 minute lesson there are two “prime-times” when the students will retain information.  The first prime-time occurs during the first 20 minutes of class and the second prime-time occurs during the last 10 minutes of class, with a 10 minute downtime in between.  This tells us that when we are teaching, we ought to use the first 20 minutes to cover new information, the 10 minutes of down-time to review old information, and the final 10 minutes for closure.

So Environmental Educators and Classroom teachers alike!  Be sure that you’re using the prime-time windows to teach new information and not to review old information, take attendance, or pass back papers.  Use the 10 minutes of down-time to have the students break up into discussion groups or practice the information in a different way.  Closure allows students the time to process the newly learned information and assign meaning to it so that it will be stored in their long-term memories.

In the near future, I plan on re-writing some of my lesson plans and interpretive talks to reflect the primacy-recency effect.  Stay tuned for a full report!   

  A bog!

Course Crossover

It’s time for a little crossover!  Last spring I took a class in Models of Teaching and Learning.  As a cumulative project, I wrote a paper on the models of teaching that are utilized in Environmental Education (EE).  Now to apply this information at a new level, let’s look at models of teaching used in EE through the lens of brain-based education.

Brain-based education tells us that learning retention increases as a teacher utilizes multi-modal teaching methods.  Engaging as many senses and different learning types as possible seems to be the best way to reach every student in the class.  So which models of teaching and learning used in  EE do this?

Role-playing and simulation were two models that I found in the peer-reviewed literature that have ties to both brain-based education and EE.  If you remember back to the last post, I alluded to how acting out a historical event can engage students.  This method falls into line with the role-playing model.  Role-playing, the process of acting out a scenario, allows students the opportunity to experience material  from different perspectives.  Simulation is closely tied to role-playing, but can include a technological component.  If you (like I did) need a few cues to differential the two, role-playing simply involves student groups acting out a situation in order to better understand it and simulation is a guided way by which students engage in real-life activities without physically doing those activities (think driver education or frog dissection computer simulations).  Both of these models have the potential to engage students kinesthetically and emotionally with the added benefits of active dialog and active listening.

At the end of the spring semester, I created and implemented a lesson plan that used role-playing/simulation as a means to teach students about the complex social implications of wolves in the Northwoods.  Students who participated were assigned a stakeholder role and told to prepare for a town hall debate where they would have to support their viewpoint and engage in discussion with others of opposing viewpoints.  I am happy to report that the students really took to the challenge.  They researched their viewpoints and did a fabulous job of staying in character throughout the debate.  After the debate was concluded, the students and I discussed how they felt about the process and what they learned from it.  They all agreed that the lesson helped them to apply their prior knowledge of wolf ecology in a new light and the method helped them to think about it at a deeper level.

A water-lily for your enjoyment

A Devotion to Emotion

Emotion plays a large role in education and the retention of learned information.  When you encounter an emotional situation your brain relies on an older part of itself, the limbic system, to process the event.  A strong emotional situation often ensures that a strong memory will be associated with it.  In a classroom setting, teachers can utilize emotional ties to help their students learn.  For example, reading first-hand accounts of historical events (and maybe even re-enacting them) in a class can literally make the subject come alive for students.  One of the cornerstones of Environmental Education (EE), through Interpretation, is to help students make emotional connections between themselves and their environment.

Interpretation and EE often walk hand-in-hand.  If you’ve ever visited a nature center and gone to a program that has a title like “I’ve Taken a Likin’ to Lichen” or “Owls: Ninjas of the Night Sky” you’ve experienced an interpretive program.  (Titles used with permission from my fellow graduate students)  One of the main foundations of every interpretive talk is the idea of tangible and intangible themes.  These themes are meant to help participants connect with the subject matter not only intellectually, but emotionally as well.  Another example for you:

I recently wrote and gave an interpretive talk called “Fool’s Fire: A Natural History Ghost Story” about the bog phenomenon known as the Will O’ the Wisp.  The tangible aspect of the talk was a chemical reaction of spontaneously combusting bog gas, while the intangible aspects were folklore, fear, mystery, danger, death, treasure, guidance, good, and evil.  In the end, the desired effect was for students to be more interested in wetland water chemistry, by connecting them to it through folklore stories that their own ancestors may have believed.  (The talk also included guessing riddles and reading excerpts from Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Dracula, so what high school student wouldn’t automatically be more interested?)

Never fear! I am indeed a Certified Interpretive Guide through the National Association of Interpretation, here’s the pin to prove it.

Some materials that I used for my interpretive talk. Note: the chemical equation is by no means a balanced equation! It’s just a general visual meant to help the students.

The Need for Novelty

It is a well-known fact that the lives that students lead at home directly affect their learning in school.  However, while general American life has evolved over the last half-century have our educational practices kept up?  In How the Brain Learns, David A. Sousa, examines the differences between our past and present environments, as well as the idea of ‘novelty’.

In a sense, our brains can be thought of as mini thrill-seekers.  We’re constantly on the look out for new and interesting situations.  Knowing this, now think of the heyday our brains experience with all the technology we encounter in today’s world.  Computers, iPods, internet, cell phones, internet on cell phones; there are relatively few instances in which the middle-class American is “unplugged”.  If this  environment of constant information influx is what our children are exposed to then it’s no wonder they can’t sit still in a classroom!  Our brains have become normalized to this high sensory input and when placed in a slower setting (like a classroom or a meeting) people’s minds tend to wander.  Sousa writes:

“They [children] spend much more time indoors with their technology, thereby missing outdoor opportunities to develop gross motor skills and socialization skills necessary to communicate and act personally and civilly with others.  One unintended consequence of spending so much time indoors is the rapid rise in number of overweight children and adolescents, now more than 17 percent of 6- to 19-year-olds (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010).”

How do we address this rising issue?  Cue the Environmental Education portion of this post!  In the EE community, the above condition is often referred to as “nature deficit disorder” (popularized by Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods).  I think that Environmental Education could be part of the solution to this need for novelty.  For our younger generations, hands-on experiences in the outdoors may provide a novel situation for their brains to explore.  Touching, feeling, tasting (when appropriate of course); engaging as many senses as possible helps students to make the learning connection.

Our brains are hard-wired to ask questions, any parent with a kindergartener knows this.  On a recent back-country canoe trip that I helped to lead, a group of students and I were canoeing through a chain of six lakes as it rained intermittently on us.  The student in my canoe was remarking on the different water colors and clarities of the lakes.  It was a simple enough phenomena, but I was amazed at how fixated on it the student was.  She was brainstorming very hard about what the cause of these differences was; cloud cover, food-webs, lake type?  We never came to a decisive answer, but this example alone shows the power that experience has on a student’s mind.

Maybe try it for yourself, go outside and spend some time observing something.  Birds at a feeder, leaves on a tree, squirrels, clouds.  See how it makes your brain feel.

An Introduction

The human brain is an amazing part of us.  About the size of your two fists put together, it is the signal processing hub for the entire body.  Neurons found throughout the body pass signals faster than the blink of an eye to your brain and then back again.  These are the signals that tell you to take your hand off the hot burner.  Keeping your brain healthy is paramount to maximizing learning potential.  Brain-based education, or educational neuroscience, focuses on the connection between brain development and learning.  If education can be tailored to how the brain learns best, think of the endless possibilities for effective education!

So what does this mean for environmental education?  Environmental Education (EE) focuses on increasing awareness, knowledge, attitude, skills, and participation towards the environment.  EE is interdisciplinary and can be incorporated into traditional classrooms in a variety of ways.  This blog will explore the connections between brain-based education and EE.  Working in unison the two have the potential to create meaningful educational experiences for youth and life-long learners alike.

A note to consider: I am neither an expert in EE or Brain-based education, so if you are reading this blog and find any errors or inconsistencies please point those out in a respectful and constructive manner.  I will endeavor to be as accurate as possible, but I am only human.  Thank you for joining me on this journey!

Some beautiful fall leaves for you to enjoy!