L. Dee Fink | Engaging Places

For several years, I have been adapting L. Dee Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning for use in museums and historic sites. Fink’s framework is enormously useful in formal education because it pushes teachers beyond simple content delivery (i.e., foundational knowledge) to application, integration, human dimension, caring, and learning how to learn. That is a helpful corrective in classrooms, where learning unfolds over a semester and where students can be asked to practice, reflect, revise, and demonstrate growth. But I am increasingly convinced that this framework does not translate as easily as I hoped to the interpretation of house museums and historic sites.

The problem is not Fink’s taxonomy itself. The problem is that historic site visitors are usually not students in a course. They are often there by choice, joined by family or friends, have uneven prior knowledge, and motivated by many different reasons: curiosity, leisure, family activity, travel, identity, or a search for meaning. They may spend 45 minutes in a guided tour, 20 minutes in an exhibition, or an afternoon in the gardens. We need a framework that recognizes these distinct conditions.

My earlier handout, “Verbs for Significant Learning Outcomes,” tried to help museums define what they wanted visitors to know, feel, or do and to create relevant, meaningful experiences. That part still feels right. The challenge is that the categories remained too close to classroom learning. Some verbs—apply, execute, operate, practice, monitor—make sense for students or professional training but are less useful for visitors at a historic house. Because house museums and historic sites interpret history, the framework should also reflect the discipline’s core practices: using evidence, recognizing perspective, acknowledging uncertainty, connecting local stories to broader patterns, and inviting public dialogue about the past. More importantly, the framework did not clearly align with the visitor journey from first encounter to deeper meaning.

That’s a lot to juggle and I may be dropping a few balls, so here’s my preliminary draft work-in-progress revised framework organized around two related ideas: Outcome Level and Outcome Ambition.

Outcome Levels

The Outcome Level describes the kind of visitor change an interpretive experience is designed to support. In plain terms, it asks: What kind of change are we trying to create in visitors? Imagine levels as a journey on a nature trail: getting oriented at the trailhead; noticing plants, insects, animals, and geology; seeing how parts of the ecosystem connect; pausing at an overlook to understand the larger landscape; and leaving with a clearer sense of what you learned, what matters to you, and what you might do next.

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When it comes to developing tours, exhibitions, events, school programs, or publications, the most important concept is to start with the goal in mind or to “design backwards.” Goals are usually defined as products, services, or deliverables, but museums are educational institutions, so our goals should shift from being about the museum or historic site produces or creates to being about what the visitor learns. In other words, what do you want visitors to know, feel, or do as a result of your tour, exhibition, or program?

“Appreciate” and “understand” are often typical outcomes, but they’re hopelessly vague and amorphous. It’s too easy for us to have different definitions of what it means to “appreciate history” or “understand the Constitution.” Thankfully, educators, psychologists, and neuroscientists have been working on the science and practice of learning for decades, providing us with frameworks and methodologies to craft more precise and actionable learning goals.

The Popular but Incomplete Bloom’s Taxonomy (skip to next section if too nerdy)

Let’s start with a brief history of the development of educational taxonomies, which systematically classify learning goals and objectives. Bloom’s Taxonomy is perhaps the most well-known framework in this area. However, users often overlook that it was originally published in 1956 as part of a broader work titled Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. This foundational text was actually the first of three planned volumes.

The first volume, authored by Benjamin Bloom and colleagues, focused on the cognitive domain (knowledge). The second volume, which addressed the affective domain (emotion), was published in 1964 by David Krathwohl. Unfortunately, the third volume, intended to cover the psychomotor domain (action), was never completed, leaving Bloom’s Taxonomy somewhat incomplete despite its significant influence on educational theory and practice.

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