5 Reasons to Integrate Social Emotional Learning in the Classroom

Classroom Teaching can become increasingly difficult especially if you are an educator who is constantly dealing with students who want to know why they are learning what they are learning or if they think that a certain concept or topic is irrelevant. This is where Social Learning comes into play which is a teaching method that allows educators to deal with students’ frustrations in more constructive and respectful ways.

Social Emotional Learning in the classroom helps and improves students at multiple levels, from better understanding their thoughts and interacting with others to making new friends, developing unique capabilities and more. In a more contemporary setup i.e. in a post pandemic world, the need for compassionate teaching is a new necessity to deal with students coming from multiple social and economic backgrounds. Social-Emotional Learning is the best remedy to address the post-pandemic situation and help bring everyone on the same footing in a multilingual and multicultural classroom.

What is Social Emotional Learning in the Classroom?

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Social Emotional Learning is a scientific methodology for children and adults to develop fundamental life skills. The process is made to understand our relationship and manage work ethically & effectively. These skills can help students control anger, resolve conflicts, make new friends, and arrive at intelligent, ethical, and safer life decisions. (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning)

SEL programs include developmentally and appropriate sequential instructions coordinated from pre-school children to high school students. The Group also focused on SEL for school, outdoor activities, and home. The methodology is also helpful for educators in professional development. It is comprehensive teaching involving school and parents for children’s social, emotional, and academic success.

Research establishes the importance of SEL, and it says the innovative teaching methodology enhances children’s performance by an average of 11 percentile points. In addition, it also shows impressive growth in pro-social behaviours such as sharing, kindness, attitude towards school, less depression, empathy, etc. (Durlak, 2011)

Let us continue with five reasons to integrate SEL in classrooms:

1) Boost Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is understanding your own strengths and weaknesses. SEL helps in the assessment of personal short- and long-term goals, emotions, values, etc. It improves confidence with a positive mindset and ethical decision-making, with immediate and life-long repercussions.

Finally, self-awareness helps recognize the interconnection of thoughts, emotions, and actions. 

2) Management Skills

Personal and Educational objectives need discipline. And discipline requires proper management of behaviours, emotions, and habits. Social and Emotional Learning in the Classroom teaches to manage impulses, control gratification, stress management, and perseverance. 

A child with the ability to manage emotions and behaviour can do wonders in education, career, and life because these are vital skills applicable at every stage of life. 

3) Socially Connected

One of the negative impacts of the digital revolution is social disconnection. SEL is the perfect way to re-plug the social connection with students from diverse cultures and beliefs. It is a significant reason to integrate SEL in the Schools.

Students will develop the ability to empathize, communicate, understand, and feel compassion for classmates through Social and Emotional Learning. The impact does last only within school premises, and good habits go everywhere from school to home to the workplace. It also builds a sense of belonging with the community and society. 

4) Communication Skills

People skills or communication skills include verbal, written, and non-verbal communication. Children learn these vital skills at school through SEL and develop the ability to listen, cooperate, teamwork, manage societal pressure, and open up about stress when required. 

The impact of polished communication skills helps understand concepts, performance at exams, life, and the workplace.

5) Improved Decision-Making Ability

Social-Emotional Learning helps make ethical and constructive choices regarding social interactions and personal behaviour in a given situation. Research says SEL can improve understanding of safety concerns, accurate behaviour patterns, ethical decision-making, social risk factors, health consideration of self and others. 

How has Covid-19 Made SEL an Essential Addition in The Classroom?

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Schools and Educational Institutions are closed for around two- years. Students are learning virtually, having zero interaction with friends and teachers. Because of social distancing, virtual Learning, and prolonged study-at-home, students have had widespread stress, anxiety, and several social & behavioural disorders. 

Let us explain the requirement of Social Emotional Learning in the classroom post-pandemic in a couple of pointers.

• The impact of study-at-home and school closure is long-lasting. Teachers have to manage conduct problems, physical classroom engagement difficulties, and emotional distress. SEL will help to re-engage, develop relationships and wellbeing.
• Students live with family 24X7, so there will be family stress once they come back to school. SEL is an excellent option to curate an environment for emotional safety and healthy connection with teachers and family members.
• Concentration in the classroom and understanding the concepts will take time post-pandemic. Social and Emotional Learning techniques will help teachers effectively engage children in school.
• SEL practices in everyday learning & teaching and social & emotional skills will help tutors and students transition from study-at-home to study-at-classroom.
• School administration can re-build a learning environment with emotion, empathy, and connection among students.

Concluding Thoughts

The positive impact of SEL has been documented and established by several studies and researchers in diverse backgrounds, from pre-school to high schools for children to adults. SEL utilized different prevention initiatives and national youth development programs in recent years. It is a method to address several social and emotional variables. SEL provides a common language and framework for educators to manage their activities. 

Integration of SEL is an innovative approach and need-of-the-hour. It will give children holistic development and make the world a better place.

 

Teaching Sustainability

In a globalizing world of limited resources and unlimited ingenuity, colleges and universities play a vital role in preparing students to meet the sustainability challenges of the future.  The imperatives of sustainability point not only to new course content, but also to new ways of teaching that content.  As a project with relevance across the disciplines, sustainability presents a valuable paradigm for rethinking pedagogy.

 

• What is Sustainability?
• Tips for Teaching Sustainability
• Interdisciplinarity
• Place-Based and Project-Based Learning
• Teaching with Ecological Footprints
• Vanderbilt and Local Resources

What is Sustainability?

What is sustainability?  What do we want to sustain?  An important part of teaching sustainability issues involves keeping these questions always open and alive.  Sustainability offers a novel framework for asking enduring philosophical questions: What is the good life?  How do we create a better world?  Thinking and teaching about sustainability are future-oriented projects, but the relevance of sustainability principles and practices must be articulated in the present.

The term “sustainability” has an important history in development literature.  In 1983, the United Nations convened the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), known informally by the name of its chair, Gro Harlem Brundtland.  The Brundtland Comission’s report, Our Common Future (1987), contains one of the most often cited definitions of sustainability:

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:

• the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and

• the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.”

The scope of sustainability is frequently described as including three spheres – social, environmental, and economic.  To use an accounting metaphor, sustainability projects must be evaluated according to a “triple bottom line” of social, environmental, and economic responsibility.  A Venn diagram depicts the interdisciplinarity of sustainability as a field of inquiry:

Sustainability is at once an integrative discipline and a multidisciplinary project; it has statistical, scientific, and humanistic dimensions.  With its focus on specific problems and particular solutions, sustainability suggests place-based and project-based approaches to student learning.  Teaching towards sustainability also reminds us that pedagogy is a civic project; there are important ties between classroom and community.

 

Tips for Teaching Sustainability

Beth Conklin, Vanderbilt University Professor of Anthropology, offers various suggestions for using ecological footprint calculators well and for teaching about sustainability issues generally:

• Beware of Student Overload.  The rhetoric of urgent and global environmental crises can overwhelm students when they consider the immensity of the problems humanity face and the difficulties involved in coping with them.   These feelings of cognitive or emotional overload can cause students to feel disengaged, disempowered, and even resentful, which can disrupt the learning process.
• Avoid Doom and Gloom.  While teaching students about the many challenges to environmental sustainability will necessarily introduce some risk of overload, teachers can limit this by being sure to discuss environmental success stories.  For example, this may include discussion of environmental policies or movements that have succeeded in mitigating pollution, conserving resources, or promoting ecological resiliency.  Whatever the success, incorporating them into courses can help students envision a future that is shaped by their agency, and avoid any descent into cynical resignation or fearful reaction.
• Focus on Quality of Life Issues.  Students facing the emotional overload of environmental problems can easily feel that their entire lifestyle is threatened by resource limits and the environmentalists who champion living simply.  Educators can sometimes add to this sense of threat by taking a moralizing, prescriptive, and unyielding approach to more sustainable lifestyles.  An alternative approach is to engage students by discussing their definitions of happiness and a quality of life, and whether they are correlated with high levels of consumption and resource use.  If students reflect prior research findings (Consumerism and its Discontents, To Do or to Have? That Is the Question), they will often argue that the two are not highly correlated, providing a basis for a positive discussion of alternative lifestyles and social changes associated with them.
• Peer Engagement and Support.  Engaging students in group discussions and projects in which they have the opportunity to dialogue and support one another can help to alleviate these feelings of overload.  It also can allow for the moments of problem-solving, debate, analysis, teamwork, and reflection that are so crucial to developing the critical thinking and leadership skills students need to face complex problems.
• Student Analysis of Data.  Students may learn more about a given environmental problem by wrestling with empirical data for themselves, rather than receiving pre-digested analyses from lectures or secondary sources.  In doing so, they will not only grapple with methodological and theoretical issues of data analysis and presentation, but they will be empowered to examine environmental issues with greater nuance and insight.
• Deconstruct Eco-rhetoric.  Spend time investigating the historical origins and often conflicting uses of environmental terminology such as “sustainability,” “environmentalism,” “stewardship,” “nature” itself, and other language.  This will provide valuable teaching moments about the historical development of environmental studies, and it will empower students to examine environmental problems and solutions more critically.
• Precautionary Principle.  Succinctly defined, the precautionary principle states that, if an action risks causing harm to the public or the environment, and there is no scientific consensus that it is indeed harmful, the burden of proof that it is NOT harmful falls on those taking the action.  An often debated principle, it provides a useful starting point for class discussions of how to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty.  It also offers an opportunity to discuss policy options regarding resource use and the tradeoffs between potential environmental harm on the one hand, and economic or political costs on the other.
• Embrace Interdisciplinarity.  A critical and thorough understanding of issues related to environmental sustainability necessarily involves contributions from a wide variety of disciplines throughout the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.   This may be daunting for students and educators alike since it often requires us to think outside of our intellectual expertise.  Doing interdisciplinarity well can be a challenge, but it becomes easier with a more effective use of resources on one’s campus community and beyond, such as team teaching with a colleague from a different discipline, organizing guest lecturers from across campus, or bringing in guest speakers from the local community.  Mostly, however, it requires a courage to step out of one’s comfort zone and explore topics that will enrich the learning experience for our students and that will stimulate us to think in new ways as educators.

Interdisciplinary

Teaching sustainability is both exciting and challenging because of the interdisciplinary nature of the problems at stake.  When teaching these issues, instructors are often working outside their own areas of expertise.  How do you bring new content knowledge into the classroom without overburdening yourself?  Ways to build interdisciplinary classrooms include:

Guest Speakers:

• Guest speakers extend the boundaries of the classroom, helping students to see the course as a part of a larger network of ideas and conversations.
• The expert’s visit presents an external motivation for students to engage with readings and assignments.
• Careful planning can help to ensure that guest contributions will enhance student learning.
• Let guests know ahead of time the topic of the course and how their visits fit with the themes of the class.
• Assign students to submit questions in the expert’s area of interest.
• Avoid presentations; invite the expert to class to participate in an interview instead.
• Consider inviting guests with opposing views.

(Information on guest speakers adapted from David Cook’s comments in Teaching and Learning Exchange 12/2 (Winter 2005): 9, published by the University Teaching Services at the University of Alberta, Canada)

Cooperative Learning:

• Take advantage of students’ diverse disciplinary and experiential knowledge.
• See also the new book, Cooperative Learning in Higher Education: Across the Disciplines (2010), edited by Barbara Millis and published by the National Teaching and Learning Forum.

 

Place-Based and Project-Based Learning

Teaching towards sustainability lends itself to place-based and project-based approaches to pedagogy.  Although sustainability is a global goal, its problems and solutions are always importantly situated in local ecologies and communities.  Instructors might consider taking a “bioregional” approach to teaching about place, encouraging students to think about their local watershed as a meaningful way to conceptualize community.  In addition, focusing on sustainability solutions requires the cultivation of an imaginative experimentalism – the difficulties involved in transitioning to a more sustainable world can only be worked out in the process of formulating practical alternatives to the problems at hand.

Field Trips

Field trips bring people together in ways that go beyond traditional classroom experiences.  Planning the logistical details of a field trip take time and foresight, but the rewards of a well-planned field experience can make it worth the effort.

• Be sensitive to time and place; it is impossible to plan for every contingency, but keep in mind the variability of seasonal weather.
• Don’t plan every minute of the trip.  Create time for observation and “poking around.”
• Create solo time – consider having students bring a journal; offer the option of a reflective writing assignment.

Campus as Sustainability Classroom

Encourage students to think of the campus as a sustainability laboratory.  Assign projects that allow students to create solutions to sustainability issues they identify in their own dormitories and dining halls. Get in touch with your campus sustainability coordinator to brainstorm projects and to help connect students with existing campus resources and organizations.

Classroom and Community

There is an important relationship between the university and the larger community of which it is a part.  Teaching about sustainability is, in large part, a civic education.  Instructors can encourage students to see not only their campus, but also the city and countryside in which it is located, as a sustainability classroom.  Assign projects that help students to map and engage with sustainability issues and initiatives in the community.  Consider assigning students to attend a city council meeting and write a response.

The CFT has a teaching guide on service learning for instructors considering incorporating action research and community engagement into their courses.

 

Teaching with Ecological Footprints

Using ecological footprints calculators is one valuable starting point for educators wishing to engage students in important dialogues about wide ranging issues of environmental sustainability and resiliency.  Ecological footprints are calculations of natural resource use that assess environmental impacts.  Typically they measure levels of resource consumption relative to resource availability, and they may be scaled to address the consumption of individuals, campus communities, cities, or entire nations.

There are two general types of calculators, “Ecological Footprint” calculators that attend to resource use across many resource categories, and those that are more specific to individual resources, most notably “Carbon Calculators.”  Ecological footprint calculators are more complex since they address a broader diversity of natural resources and their uses, and they typically measure resource use against the total amount of resources available, thus accounting for some approximation of the natural limits to consumption.  Carbon Calculators are measures of carbon resource consumption and are particularly useful as they pertain to one of the most significant environmental threats and policy issues of our time, namely climate change.  They arguably are also good proxies for resource use generally since fossil fuel use is deeply embedded in all forms of consumption.  Usually carbon calculations do not involve a measure of the total natural stock of carbon-based fuels or other resources, although their results may be analyzed in the context of levels of atmospheric pollution thought necessary to curb such problems as climate change.

Footprint Calculators

There are many varieties of ecological footprint calculators.

• Among the most reliable are those associated with the Global Footprint Network, the largest and most respected assemblage of expertise on ecological accounting.  Collectively, the GFN has developed the largest and most complex datasets, and have set the standards by which roughly ninety percent of ecological footprints are calculated.
• Carbon Calculators.  Some useful individual or household calculators are:
  • U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Household Emissions Calculator
  • The Conservation Fund’s Go Zero calculator
  • Bonneville Environmental Foundation
  • Chuck Wright’s Carbon Calculator
  • SafeClimate sponsored by the World Resources Institute
  • American Forests calculator
  • TerraPass, a carbon offsets provider
• For a comparative study of these Carbon Calculators conducted by Vanderbilt University’s own J. Paul Padgett, John H. Clarke, and Michael Vandenbergh, along with University of Washington’s Anne Steineman, please consult “A Comparison of Carbon Calculators.” 2008. Environmental Impact Assessment Review. 28: 106-115.

Classroom Uses of Footprints

The teaching moments afforded by footprint calculators are many and may be found in courses across the disciplines:

• Making the invisible visible.  Much of our consumption and its many environmental impacts are not immediately obvious since they are obscured by our limited knowledge of any number of complex extraction and production processes.  Ecological footprints encourage investigation and discussion of these processes and thus afford many opportunities to consider more fully human impacts on the natural world.
• Ecological literacy.  Footprint calculations can give us a window into the ecological processes on which our ways of life depend, and thus provide occasions to discuss natural resource and waste management, particularly resource depletion, renewal, and toxification.  Indeed, one benefit of footprint calculations is that they account for natural limits to resource use and therefore help students to attend to the overconsumption of natural resources, or “overshoot,” and its implications for future generations.
• Social literacy.  Examining any ecological footprint will inevitably lead to investigations of the development of social systems – political, economic, and cultural – that shape human consumption and production.  This will give students chances to achieve greater social literacy by learning such things as population demographics, consumption trends, economic development models, and policy priorities, just to name a few.
• Lifestyle choices.  Ecological footprint calculators provide a unique feedback mechanism to students about the impacts of their consumption and the lifestyle associated with it.  These highly personal choices – from diet to energy use – can be emotionally loaded and thus difficult to discuss.  But when done tactfully, discussion of personal consumption can yield profound learning moments and new intellectual inquiry for the future.  Among the most interesting questions is to what extent individual or household consumption can help solve problems such as climate change, something Vanderbilt researchers, Amanda Carrico, Mike Vandenbergh, and Jonathan Gilligan have researched with Paul Stern, Gerald Gardner and Thomas Dietz. Read their paper “Energy and Climate Change: Key Lessons for Implementing the Behavioral Wedge.”
• Environmental history.  As footprint calculations are conducted over time, we may have more accurate assessments of cumulative impacts and thus have a clearer sense of how human society has shaped the natural world, and vice versa.
• Inequality.  Footprint calculations compared over individuals, groups, or entire nations can provide a basis for wide-ranging discussions of inequality in resource use and waste, as well as the cultural, political, and economic systems that structure them.
• Policy analysis.  More precise ecological accounting inevitably leads to discussions of different regimes of resource management, and thus offers opportunities to debate environmental policy at the local, national, or global level.  Further, because ecological footprints can suggest multiple and highly different models of achieving sustainability, they may foster discussion about a wide range of environmental policies.
• Future directions.  Ecological footprint discussions often lead to broad yet urgent student questions about how to define and construct a sustainable society.  These are among the most difficult questions to answer because they are weighted with many complexities, uncertainties, and moral quandaries.  Yet, such questions can provide openings for fruitful discussions of ways students may engage in new areas of research, policy, and leadership.

Limitations of Footprints

Footprint calculators are not without their limitations, however.  Even so, the limitations of footprint calculators below afford their own teaching moments.  In reference to Carbon Calculators, Mike Vandenbergh, Vanderbilt University Professor of Law, suggests several limitations are important to consider:

• Non-transparency.  Carbon Calculators involve many data points and complex calculations.  To make them accessible to a wide audience, they often simplify the results and fail to disclose some of the methods or data sources involved.  This can limit the educational potential of the calculators.  Therefore, it is important to understand the methods behind the calculations and make this part of the teaching process.
• Limited inputs.  Some calculators are better than others.  Some use too few or unreliable sources of data, while others do not.  Therefore it is important to know the sources and methods of footprint calculations and to encourage students to think critically about them.
• Lack of context.  Carbon footprint calculations can provide useful measures of carbon emissions, but their relevance is always dependent upon the teaching context.  Thus it is important for educators to use them well and to contextualize their use within specific learning goals of the course and broader disciplinary orientations towards questions of sustainability.
• Skepticism.  Many students may regard footprint calculations skeptically for a variety of reasons: the publicity and persuasiveness of climate change skepticism, the personal threat they may feel to their lifestyle, or the challenge they may feel to their political identity, just to name three.  However, a critical, comprehensive, and not selective skepticism is something to be encouraged in students, and these reactions present teaching moments about the challenges of critical thinking and of the difficult choices posed by global environmental problems.

Ecological Footprints Resources

The Global Footprint Network supports the shift towards a sustainable economy by advancing the Ecological Footprint, a measurement and management tool that makes the reality of global limits central to decision-making.  Ecological footprint projects can be an effective way to get students thinking about how sustainability intersects with their lives.

The latest results from Vanderbilt’s Green House Gas Emissions Survey may be especially useful for Vanderbilt faculty who wish to incorporate campus operations and sustainability into their courses.  Some interesting highlights:

Vanderbilt University’s total carbon footprint for 2009 is approximately 464,240 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MTCO2E), a 2.4% decrease since 2005.

Of this total, 39% is electricity purchased from NES, 23% is from coal use at the VU power plant, 19% is from faculty and staff commuting, and 14% is from natural gas use at the VU power plant.  This is represented in the pie chart below:

Carleton College’s Science Education Resource Center (SERC).  A broad and multifaceted program, SERC is home to various resources and links that may be of use, including the Climate Literacy Network, the Pedagogy in Action website, and Teaching the Earth, among other valuable sites.

“The Ecological Footprint: Accounting for a Small Planet,” a film produced by Bullfrog Films in 2005, features Dr. Mathis Wackernagel and is a good introduction to natural resource accounting.  Directed by Patsy Northcutt for the Global Footprint Network, it is 30 minutes long.

“Ecological Footprint Feedback: Motivating or Discouraging?,” an article by Amara Brook in Social Influence (Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 113-28, 2011), discusses the psychological challenges of motivating students with ecological footprints.  While some students with high personal commitments to environmental sustainability were motivated to take action by their own footprint data, others without such commitments were not.  This suggests at the very least that teaching with ecological footprints requires nuance and intentional discussion of their affective aspects.

 

Vanderbilt and Local Resources

Sustainability and Environmental Management Office: The SustainVU website offers an invaluable resource for instructors who want to familiarize themselves with the sustainability landscape at Vanderbilt.  SEMO’s mission is to initiate, promote, coordinate, evaluate, and encourage environmental management and sustainability initiatives that improve Vanderbilt’s impact on the community and environment.

Vanderbilt Biodiesel Initiative: VBI is Vanderbilt’s student-run biodiesel production system, which converts waste vegetable oil into biodiesel fuel that is used by several VU diesel-fueled engines.  One of the byproducts of this process, glycerin, is used to make EcoSuds soap, which is sold at several locations on campus.  VBI aims to educate others about the viability of biodiesel as an alternative fuel.

Vanderbilt School for Science and Math:  The School for Science and Math is a joint venture between VUMC and Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools offering high school students an interdisciplinary, research-centered learning experience.  The School for Science and Math has developed innovative sustainability projects and learning experiences, including a biodiversity inventory of Vanderbilt’s campus, a bioassessment of the Little Harpeth River, and a videoconference with scientists in Hawaii to discuss the Pacific Gyre Garbage Patch.

Tennessee Higher Education Sustainability Association: THESA is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and promoting sustainability initiatives taking place within higher education institutions within Tennessee.  It seeks to ensure that the societal movement toward sustainability is reflected in and promoted at college and university campuses across the state.   The THESA website offers information about relevant conferences and other events, resources for instructors, information on model programs across the state, and updates on campus sustainability initiatives in the local news.

Organizations and Journals

The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education: AASHE is an association of colleges and universities working to create a sustainable future.  AASHE provides resources, professional development opportunities, and a network of support to enable institutions to model and advance sustainability in everything from governance and operations to education and research.  Vanderbilt is a member of AASHE, with full access to their resources.  Just be sure to use your @vanderbilt.edu address when signing up for an account.

The Association for Experiential Education: AEE is a nonprofit, professional membership association dedicated to experiential education and the students, educators and practitioners who utilize its philosophy.  Their website includes information on relevant books, articles, conferences, and other resources.

The Journal of Sustainability Education: JSE serves as a forum for academics and practitioners to share, critique, and promote research, practices, and initiatives that foster the integration of economic, ecological, and socio-cultural dimensions of sustainability within formal and non-formal educational contexts.  JSE is a peer-reviewed, open-access, trans- and interdisciplinary e-journal.

The Center for Ecoliteracy: The Center for Ecoliteracy promotes the green schooling movement.  The Center is best known for its work with school gardens, school lunches, and integrating ecological principles and sustainability into school curricula.  The Center for Ecoliteracy offers books; teaching guides; professional development seminars; a sustainability leadership academy; keynote presentations; and consulting services.

Going Green on Campus: This site, from Let’s Go Solar, has some useful tools for students to use to consider their campus consumption, resource use, and impact.

Books

Aber, John, Tom Kelly and Bruce Mallory, Eds. The Sustainable Learning Community: One University’s Journey to the Future. New Hampshire, 2009.

Barlett, Peggy, and Geoffery Chase.  Sustainability on Campus: Stories and Strategies for Change.  Boston: MIT Press, 2004. (available in the CFT library)

Blewitt, John and Cederic Cullingford, Eds. The Sustainability Curriculum: The Challenge for Higher Education. Earthscan, 2004.

Creighton, Sarah Hammond. Greening the Ivory Tower: Improving the Environmental Track Record of Universities, Colleges, and Other Institutions. MIT Press, 1998.

Hernandez, Carlos, and Rashmi Mayur.  Pedagogy of the Earth: Education for a Sustainable Future.  Kumarian Press, 1999.

Kahn, Richard.  Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: the Ecopedagogy Movement. Peter Lang Publishing, 2010.

M’Gonigle, Michael and Justine Starke. Planet U: Sustaining the World, Reinventing the University. New Society Publishers, 2006.

Murray, Paul. The Sustainable Self: A Personal Approach to Sustainability Education. Earthscan, 2011.

Orr, David.  Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World.  Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.

Rappaport, Ann and Sarah Hammond Creighton. Degrees that Matter: Climate Change and the University. MIT Press, 2007.

Stibbe, Arran. The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy: Skills for a Changing World.  Green Books Press, 2010.  (available in the CFT library)

Bloom’s Taxonomy -Best Tool for Teaching and Learning

Are you trying to teach people without identifying educational objectives? 

If you keep doing that, your learners may waste their time succeeding in things that are of no use to them. To avoid that, clarify your instructional goals using Bloom’s Taxonomy.

This article will help you learn:

What is Bloom’s Taxonomy?
Original Bloom’s Taxonomy
Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy
Bloom’s Taxonomy levels
Why Bloom’s Taxonomy is important?
Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs

What is Bloom’s Taxonomy?

Bloom’s Taxonomy attempts to classify learning stages from remembering facts to creating new ideas based on the acquired knowledge.

The idea of Bloom’s Taxonomy is that learning is a consecutive process. Before applying a concept in real life, we must understand it. Before we understand a concept, we must remember the key facts related to it.

Therefore, although initially described as a framework, it is now often depicted as a pyramid.

The basis of the pyramid is Knowledge, the first level of learning. Above it lies Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation. Each level above builds upon the one below, so you can only move up the pyramid one step at a time.

Original Bloom’s Taxonomy

The original taxonomy was first described in 1956 in the book Taxonomy of Educational Objectives by American educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom and his coauthors Max Englehart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl. Their book classifies learning goals into one of the categories mentioned above (from Knowledge to Evaluation).

Their goal was to provide teachers with a common vocabulary to discuss curricular and evaluation problems with greater precision.

The language teachers had been using to explain what they expected of their students was, according to the authors, no more than “nebulous terms.”

“For example, some teachers believe their students should ‘really understand,’ others desire their students to internalize knowledge, still others want their students to grasp the core or essence or comprehend. Do they all mean the same thing?” asked the authors.

The taxonomy of educational objectives was supposed to help teachers speak the same language and thus “facilitate the exchange of information about their curricular developments and evaluation devices.”

Though it was designed primarily for college professors, it finally became popular among educators, from K-12 teachers to corporate trainers.

Since its publication, the book has been translated into more than twenty languages and is now used for instructional design worldwide. However, it is currently more often applied in its revised version.

Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy

To provide learners with clearer instructional goals, a group of researchers led by Bloom’s colleague David Krathwohl and one of Bloom’s students, Lorin Anderson, revised the taxonomy in 2001.

In the new variant, nouns were replaced by action verbs. Also, the two highest levels of the taxonomy were swapped. The new learning stages are Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate and Create. The authors also defined cognitive processes associated with these instructional goals. For example, the ability to remember requires recognizing and recalling.

Bloom’s Taxonomy levels

Let’s take a closer look at each learning stage, based on the book describing the revised framework A Taxonomy For Learning, Teaching and Assessing by Krahtwohl and Anderson. The authors recommend reading the name of each learning category as though preceded by the phrase “The student is able to…” or “The student learns to…”

1. Remember

This stage of learning is about memorizing basic facts, dates, events, persons, places, concepts and patterns.

At this level, educators might ask learners simple questions like:What are the most spoken languages of Latin America?

What is the chemical formula of water?
Who was the first president of the United States?

The associated cognitive processes, as already noted, are:

Recognizing means locating knowledge in long-term memory related to presented material

(e.g., recognizing the dates of important historical events).

Recalling is retrieving knowledge from long-term memory 

(e.g., recalling the dates of important historical events).

2. Understand

At this point, learners might be asked to explain a concept in their own words, describe a mathematical graph or clarify a metaphor.

The processes associated with understanding are:

Interpreting implies changing from one form of representation to another. It might be transforming numerical information into verbal.

Exemplifying is finding a specific illustration of a concept or principle. It may be giving several examples of Suprematist paintings.

Classifying is determining a category of something. 

An example is the classification of mental disorders.
Summarizing means retrieving a general theme of significant points (e.g., writing a short summary of a story).

Inferring is drawing a logical conclusion from given information. It may be formulating grammatical principles of a foreign language from the presented examples.

Comparing is finding correspondences between two ideas or objects (e.g., comparing historical events to their contemporary analogues).
Explaining is constructing a cause-and-effect model of a system, for example, explaining the causes of the French Revolution.

3. Apply

Now, it’s time to use learned facts and abstractions in new contexts and particular situations.

For example, students might be asked to discuss phenomena described in one scientific paper using terms and concepts of another paper.

The processes of cognition corresponding to this stage are:Executing is applying a procedure to a familiar task 

(e.g., calculating the root of a number).

Implementing is about applying a procedure to an unfamiliar task (e.g., using Newton’s Second Law in a new situation).

4. Analyze

At this level, students are supposed to break down concepts and examine their relationships.

For instance, they might be asked to recognize the genre of a painting or describe the leading causes of the Great Depression.

The three particular processes associated with this stage are:

Differentiating means distinguishing important from unimportant parts of presented material 

(e.g., distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant numbers in a mathematical word problem).

Organizing involves identifying how elements fit or function within a structure 

(e.g., finding the hypothesis, method, data and conclusion in a research report).
Attributing means determining a point of view, bias, values, or intent underlying presented material. An example would be to identify the author’s point of view of an essay.

5. Evaluate

In this stage, learners are expected to use their knowledge and skills to appraise a situation, justify their stand or criticize others’ opinions. They should be able to point out logical fallacies in arguments or compare a work to the highest standards in its field.

They might be asked, for example:In your opinion, is online piracy ethical?
Do you consider jazz music to be high art?
What are the most absurd arguments against vegetarianism?

Evaluating is divided into checking and critiquing.Checking means detecting inconsistencies or fallacies in a process or product. For example, it’s determining if a scientist’s conclusions follow from observed data.

Critiquing involves finding inconsistencies between a product and external criteria. For instance, it’s judging which of two methods is the best for solving a problem.

6. Create

This is the most complex stage of the learning process and the top of the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy.

At this level, learners combine known patterns, ideas and facts to create original work or formulate their solution to a problem.

They might be asked to compose a song, rewrite a story in another setting or formulate a hypothesis and propose a way of testing it.

The three associated cognitive processes are:Generating involves coming up with alternative hypotheses based on criteria. 

An example might be devising multiple solutions for a social problem.

Planning is about coming up with a procedure for completing a task (e.g., preparing an outline of an article).

Producing means inventing a product 

(e.g., writing a short story that takes place during the American Revolution).

Why Bloom’s Taxonomy is important

Bloom’s Taxonomy can help educators map learning within a single lesson or even a whole course.

Using the taxonomy as a guide, trainers can identify clear instructional goals corresponding to each taxonomy level and create plans to achieve them.

By setting achievable objectives for learners, instructors make them more active and responsible for their education.

The taxonomy can also be useful for evaluating learners correctly. An essay, for example, is probably not the best form of testing when learners only need to remember basic facts and terminology related to the topic. But it will be appropriate at the evaluation stage when they are expected to formulate their opinion on an issue.

Bloom’s taxonomy allows educators to gauge the learners’ progress. It helps teachers determine which level every learner is on and assign them an individual task.

Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs

When talking about Bloom’s taxonomy, action verbs associated with the categories and cognitive processes are often mentioned. Instructors use these verbs to describe activities required for achieving educational objectives corresponding to each level.

For instance, at the analyzing level, the Azusa Pacific University recommends using verbs like “compare”, “distinguish”, and “simplify” when formulating instructional tasks.

There is a list of Bloom’s taxonomy verbs, created by the University of Arkansas. Using these verbs can help learners explicitly navigate what they must do to demonstrate their mastery of the objective.

However, neither Bloom’s original book nor his followers’ book contains a list of such verbs. The authors of a study of 47 verb lists collected from 35 universities and textbooks note: “There was very little agreement between these lists, most of which were not supported by evidence explaining where the verbs came from.”

Nevertheless, given that such lists of verbs are being created anyway, the authors identified verbs that appeared in more than 50% of the listings. Then they identified verbs for which 50% of their appearances were in one specific tier. Using these verbs, the authors constructed “A Master List of Action Verbs for Learning Outcomes.”

Why Use Bloom’s Taxonomy?

The authors of the revised taxonomy suggest a multi-layered answer to this question, to which the author of this teaching guide has added some clarifying points:Objectives (learning goals) are important to establish in a pedagogical interchange so that teachers and students alike understand the purpose of that interchange.

Organizing objectives helps to clarify objectives for themselves and for students.

Having an organized set of objectives helps teachers to:“plan and deliver appropriate instruction”;

“design valid assessment tasks and strategies”;and

“ensure that instruction and assessment are aligned with the objectives.”