Bloom's Taxonomy and Deming's TQM in Writing Instruction
This paper critically reviews James Hills's 2004 article "Better Teaching with Deming and Bloom," published in Quality Progress. Hills, a writing instructor nearing retirement, combined Benjamin Bloom's Cognitive Taxonomy with W. Edwards Deming's Total Quality Management model to create a mentoring-centered classroom approach. The review summarizes Hills's argument, identifies the main elements of his instructional model, evaluates its strengths and weaknesses, and suggests improvements. While the article offers innovative ideas for tracking and evaluating student writing through a rubric and quality control sheet, the review finds significant weaknesses in Hills's evidence base, lack of scholarly support, and absence of any critical self-assessment of his own model.
- Overview of Hills's Article: Summary of Hills's classroom experiment and methods
- Hills's Main Argument: Traditional instruction fails; continuous feedback corrects errors
- Core Elements of the Instructional Model: Five pillars combining Bloom, Deming, and mentoring
- Evaluation of Hills's Conclusions: Statistics reviewed; alternative explanations considered
- Strengths and Weaknesses of the Article: Innovative tools praised; thin evidence base criticized
- Suggested Improvements and Their Potential Effects: Real data, literature review, and self-critique recommended
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What makes this paper effective
- Follows a clear, structured critical-review format, moving logically from summary to analysis to suggested improvements.
- Demonstrates critical thinking by acknowledging the article's genuine strengths before systematically addressing its weaknesses.
- Uses specific textual evidence and direct quotations from the source article to support evaluative claims.
- Raises a pointed methodological question — whether student satisfaction reflected easier coursework rather than genuine learning gains — showing depth of analysis.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper exemplifies source critique, a core undergraduate skill. The writer does not simply summarize Hills's argument but interrogates the evidence behind it, identifying the gap between the author's enthusiasm and the actual data provided. The use of a counter-explanation (students may have preferred the system because it eliminated tests rather than because it improved writing) is a strong example of alternative-hypothesis reasoning.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a content summary of Hills's article, then moves through the main argument, the five core elements of Hills's model, an evaluation of the conclusions, a strengths-and-weaknesses section, and finally a prescriptive section recommending fixes. This mirrors a standard article-critique scaffold and is well-suited to undergraduate coursework in education or composition pedagogy.
Overview of Hills's Article
Hills, J.A. (2004). Better teaching with Deming and Bloom. Quality Progress, 37(3), 57–64.
The author, a teacher nearing retirement, was frustrated with the level of success his writing students were achieving. Many were dropping out, and those who remained were earning C's and D's. Concluding that his traditional methods — lecturing, quizzes, tests, and standard homework assignments — were not working, he decided to conduct an experiment in his classroom. He devised his own model of instruction that combined Benjamin Bloom's Cognitive Taxonomy and Blue-Ribbon Tutoring Concepts with W. Edwards Deming's model of Total Quality Management.
Hills used these two frameworks to develop a quality control sheet (drawn from Deming) and to convert Bloom's taxonomy into a rubric. He also incorporated a Helpdesk strategy, which required students to meet with the teacher at the Helpdesk to receive assignments and to discuss areas in need of improvement. Student progress was tracked through a footnote system consisting of scores of 1 or 0 in each of the five competency categories outlined by Bloom: sentence structure, idea development, organization, conventions, and word choice.
Hills uses the example of a fictitious student named Hank to demonstrate the mentoring process through the Helpdesk. He provides fictitious dialogue between the mentor and the student, making the point that acting as a mentor rather than a lecturer is central to the method. He describes how the mentor helps Hank improve in each of the five areas — not by telling him what to do, but by helping him discover how to make his work "reader friendly." Hills expresses great confidence in this process.
Hills's Main Argument
Hills's main argument is that traditional methods of instruction are not effective in writing classes, and that he has developed a teaching strategy allowing students to improve their writing skills in a continuous and systematic manner. The central benefit of his system, Hills asserts, is that "it can reveal the errors in learning shortly after they occur, and if appropriate corrections are introduced as they are needed, the educational system can be a self-correcting system so errors made at one time can be corrected before they are compounded with later errors."
This philosophy is rooted in W. Edwards Deming's Total Quality Management philosophy, which emphasizes correcting problems at the source rather than simply discarding defective products at the end of the production line.
Core Elements of the Instructional Model
The main elements of Hills's argument are as follows:
1. Bloom's Cognitive Taxonomy — with the ultimate goal of mastery — makes an ideal rubric for assessing student progress in writing.
2. W. Edwards Deming's Quality Control Sheet provides an ideal format for tracking student progress across five areas, using a binary footnote system.
3. Combining these instruments with a Helpdesk and mentoring approach — as opposed to traditional lecturing and testing — helps correct important problems in individual students' writing before they compound into larger and more complex issues.
4. Deming's "plan-do-check-act cycle," which follows a constructivist approach to building on prior knowledge and planning assignments collaboratively, promotes mastery and continuous progress.
5. This strategy allows the teacher to customize assignments to address each student's current deficiencies and to make rational predictions about future progress.
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