Duckworth on Education: Bloom’s Road Map to Educational Achievement

Of the greatest sins in EMS education, the worst is probably turning your back on the class to read bullet points from a PowerPoint slide. But not too much farther down the list is a sin that can trap even the best EMS educators: failing to pave the path to student success.

“Paving the path” is not spoon-feeding students. Effective EMS education always requires a clear path, whether you are teaching virtually or in person, brand-new students or seasoned professionals. Without this clear path a few trailblazers may bushwhack their way to success, but great EMS educators never leave their students without a map and compass.

Choose Your Competency

The first step in any journey is deciding on the destination. In EMS education our destination is the competency. The competency is what the student will do or the way they will behave that they could not achieve before class. This is literally the difference you make as an educator.

It is crucial to clearly identify the critical part of the competency as a learning objective. You can read more about that here, but for now all we need is to identify the general competency—the destination for our students. An evidence-based tool to help us do this is Bloom’s taxonomy, based on the research of educators Benjamin Bloom and David Krathwohl. You may have already heard of Bloom’s taxonomy, but even if you haven’t, a quick Google search will reveal a variety of tools to help you guide students to their education destination. Here’s a good place to start: https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/.

Three Domains

The first part of Bloom’s taxonomy that can help us is divided into three familiar domains: knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Bloom called these cognitive, psychomotor, and affective domains.

To find the right destination, EMS educators must begin by asking themselves, “Why am I running this class?” If the answer is something like, “We need to make sure EMS providers are wearing proper PPE on every call,” then the EMS educator must decide if they need to help students develop knowledge (they don’t know they should be wearing PPE, what PPE to wear, or how to wear it), skill (they don’t have the physical skill to put the PPE on), or attitude (they don’t think it’s necessary or worth the trouble).

It’s OK if the educator decides that several competencies must be accomplished. This just means there will be more stops along the path to the final destination. However, educators must avoid a shotgun approach that spends a lot of time dragging students to destinations they don’t need to reach. Remember that students need to accomplish something at the end of instruction that they could not do before. When educators teach a little of everything “just in case,” the students will rightly feel most of the course is a waste of their time. This will frustrate students, causing them to lose interest in getting to the actual destination.

Student Levels

The next step Bloom can help us with is identifying where students are right now in their journeys. Bloom tells us that in each domain, students can be operating at lower levels, such as memorizing information without really understanding it, up through understanding and being able to apply what they know, all the way to being able to use knowledge and experience to come up with new solutions to real-world problems. Whatever our topic and whatever domain we are focusing on, we ultimately want our EMS providers to get to that top level, because that’s the environment in which we live and work.

However, Bloom tells us we don’t have to get there all in one step. Suppose we are introducing something brand-new to students. In that case we have to be careful not to run straight to the end or risk losing students along the way. When it looks like it’s going to be a long journey from where the student is now to the destination competency they need to achieve, it is best to plan several stops to rest along the way.

In the end the exact steps the students need to take will depend on their aptitude, the resources available, the abilities of the educators involved, and the context of the education. When the educator identifies the destination, the starting point, and the rest of the points along the way, everyone is more likely to have a successful journey in EMS education. In this way Bloom’s taxonomy can help us pave a path to peak performance for our students.

• Begin by deciding on the destination: the competency the student will achieve.
• Identify which domains or combination of cognitive, psychomotor, and affective changes you will need to help the students achieve.
• With that destination in mind, identify where students are now.
• A brief recap or refresher may be helpful to get a diverse group to the same starting point for the journey.
• Clearly articulate the path to everyone involved in the trip.

By using Bloom’s tools to help us refine the start and end of our trip, each educator can pave that pathway as appropriate based on individual means, resources, and the context in which the learning will occur. It may require us to stop and have a good think before we teach our next class, but great educators never leave their students to wander the woods alone.

Rommie L. Duckworth, LP, is a dedicated emergency responder and award-winning educator with more than 25 years working in career and volunteer fire departments, hospital healthcare systems, and public and private emergency medical services. He is currently a career fire captain and paramedic EMS coordinator.