The vision of Developmental Teaching and Learning and Bloom's Taxonomy of educational objectives

Abstract Several well-known concepts in contemporary psychology and education are scrutinized from the standpoint of Developmental Teaching and Learning (DTL) framework grounded in Piotr Galperin's research. In particular, DTL reveals the need to take a fresh look at and radically revise the key suppositions that underlie the currently influential Bloom's Taxonomy of educational objectives. From the DTL perspective, the Taxonomy has multiple conceptual problems – it reflects a number of deeply entrenched and widely spread misconceptions about how the human mind works, how students learn, and therefore, how teachers need to teach. The major issue is that the Taxonomy is implicitly based on outdated mentalist assumptions and on the mechanistic model of human cognition as “information processing.” By contrast, DTL argues that knowledge is not “information” but rather a set of activities; activities cannot be “stored and retrieved” but can only be developed, enacted, and re-enacted. Thinking about the mind and students' cognitive abilities in terms of activities that are inseparable from the acting person, rather than in misleading terms of stages and levels of “objective information processing,” changes the entire discourse about educational goals, learning, and teaching.