what is masbloom? | Dr. victor rios
What is Masbloom?
January 2023 | Prosperity Practice Highlight
How can we maintain high expectations and still provide the right support and scaffolds for at-promise youth?
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Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Psychologist Abraham Maslow developed the hierarchy of needs to address the social-emotional needs of humans. When used in education, the emphasis in this approach is in providing students with basic human needs such as proper meals and proper healthcare, alongside strong emotional support. The assumption is that these social-emotional supports will help students reach academic success and self-actualization.
Bloom's Taxonomy
Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom developed a taxonomy of learning that emphasizes the cognitive, affective, and sensory domains. In the cognitive domain of his taxonomy, Bloom focused on academic-based outcomes such as remembering, understanding, applying, and analyzing. These are arenas that high rigor/high demand teachers may be comfortable with.
Maslow (SEL) and Bloom's (Rigor)
The adoption of the Common Core State Standards in 2010 left behind (pun intended) the “Just Choose C” mindset and placed an increased—if often unnuanced—emphasis on instructional rigor. Less than a decade later, educators began to realize this focus came at the expense of student health and well-being, and Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) gained massive popularity.
Unfortunately as with most paradigms in education, Rigor and SEL became victims of overuse, their fundamental meaning culled and cherry-picked for quick fixes: for educators, rigor quickly became synonymous with more work, and SEL translated into coddling students.
We Need Both!
My research with at-promise youth over the last two decades confirms that students need both love and accountability, consistently and in tandem with one another.
In a System of Prosperity, instructional rigor and social-emotional learning cannot continue to remain mutually exclusive. Our students need to be held to high academic expectations without sacrificing their emotional health and well-being in the process.
As a result, I developed the Masbloom Framework. Masbloom is the fusing together of Maslow’s Heierarchy of Needs and Bloom’s Taxonomy paradigms and waves them throughout everyday teaching practices.
But beyond classroom practice, Masbloom also addresses some core beliefs of adults that have significant, transformative impact on students:
When educators bring these two worlds together, students of all backgrounds are provided opportunities for feeling a sense of belonging, safety, and caring, while also feeling the self-efficacy to master academic material. Masbloom empowers educators to implement high social-emotional support, combined with high rigor and expectations, allowing us to achieve prosperity for all students.
