– Hi, everyone. I’m Niya Bond, Faculty Developer here at OneHE, and I’m excited to talk to you today about Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning. Now, if you’ve ever designed a course or written learning outcomes, chances are you’re familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy. It’s often represented as a pyramid, and there are different cognitive skills that learners can work through from the basics of kind of remembering and understanding to more, I guess, cognitively heavy skills like application or creation or analysis and evaluation. And Bloom’s Taxonomy is a great foundation for thinking about how students move through that process.

But today we’re gonna talk about Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning and what makes that different and also beneficial and valuable. So, Fink’s Taxonomy asks a really powerful question, what makes learning truly meaningful and lasting? So it’s less about moving through sequential or series-driven tasks and more about kind of a holistic learning experience. Now, Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning has six interconnected dimensions. We’re not talking about sequential periodic tasks, we’re talking about interconnected dimensions, and we’ll go through each one of them. But remember, it’s not hierarchical. So foundational knowledge is the first. The facts and ideas that students need to build on is considered foundational knowledge. Then application, so taking that knowledge and then applying it somehow through critical thinking, creative work or practical skills. Integration is about connections. So those connections can occur across multiple ideas, but even further across disciplines or experiences. Human dimension, that’s learning about oneself and others, so interconnectedness and interrelation. Caring, that’s developing new interests, values or commitments. And then learning how to learn, so getting a little bit meta and becoming more self-aware and becoming more self-directed.

So, as I mentioned before, with Fink’s Taxonomy, you don’t have to start at the bottom and work your way up like you do in Bloom’s. Instead, all six types of learning can show up together, and that’s where the magic happens. So let’s think about an example. Let’s take an Intro to Psychology course. A Bloom’s style learning outcome might be define and describe the major theories of personality. So that’s a solid outcome. It covers foundational knowledge. It’s kind of at the start of the Bloom’s pyramid because we’re defining and describing, we’re not necessarily analyzing or evaluating or applying. But a Fink’s style outcome would be different than that. A Fink’s style outcome might be analyze how different personality theories shape your understanding of yourself and others, and reflect on which ones align with your worldview. So here we’ve added human dimension, integration and even caring. So we have learners doing those cognitive skills like analyzing, comparing, contrasting, but we also have them thinking about their interconnectedness with others, their experiences across a worldview, and then caring for for oneself and thinking about the ways in which it might help with values and personal perspectives. Basically, we’re not just teaching students what Freud said in this example, we’re helping them understand themselves and the people around them.

Okay, so let’s think about another example. We’re teaching General Chemistry, a Bloom’s-based goal for that kind of introductory level course could be apply the ideal gas law to solve problems involving pressure and volume. So that’s totally useful, right? It’s probably something students need to do to move on to whatever’s next in chemistry, but it’s not the only way to approach learning in that specific context. So with Fink’s we might ask, “How can we make this meaningful and lasting?” And to do that, we might change the outcome in the following way: use the ideal gas law to explore real-world environmental issues and reflect on how chemistry connects to sustainability in your community. Now, in this example, we’ve moved into the realm of application, integration and caring. So we’re thinking about ways to help with sustainability, we’re thinking about connections between the learner and the larger world, and we’re thinking about personal values and commitment when we’re asking learners to think about doing this in the context of their community. Okay, so we’ve talked about Fink’s broadly and how it differs from Bloom’s, we’ve given two specific examples of how it might change the learning outcomes and thus the learning process with the focus on making things meaningful and lasting. And now we’re gonna talk about why does this matter? Well, it matters because Fink’s Taxonomy reminds us that courses aren’t just content, it’s about transformation. These are transformational learning processes, and the lived experiences of our learners should and can be part of that process.

So, Fink’s Taxonomy and its six dimensions are all about helping students grow as thinkers, citizens, and learners for life. Again, it’s more about the context of the learner and the world around them, which includes the content of the course, but isn’t solely and exclusively focused on it. Now, if you are interested in bringing Fink’s Taxonomy to your learning environment, you don’t have to go full scale, you can do it in small, easy, achievable steps and kind of test the waters, and here are some ways that you might approach that. So one is you can look at your current outcomes. Is there any place in your current outcomes to touch upon any of the dimensions like reflection, connection, or identity? If so, try working in one of Fink’s dimensions and see how it goes. You might try revising to include something from the human dimension or learning how to learn as those tend to be a little bit easier to fit in on first pass. Now the third is to ask, “What do I want students to still remember or still feel, that feeling, that affective elements a little bit different than Bloom’s, five years from now?” And so that is that meaningful and lasting element.

Now, you’ve got a little bit of context, you have some examples for how this can practically be implemented, and now you have some encouragement from me to go ahead and try to implement even in a small way in your learning environment. And really think about the way that Fink’s can give us a language and a challenge to design learning that’s gonna stick, and that’s the kind of teaching that’s gonna change lives. So I hope you’re excited about Fink’s Taxonomy as I am, and thanks for watching. Happy course designing, and I hope you’ll share your experiences implementing or even just pondering Fink’s with us here in the community.