Transformative Learning Theory

My personal philosophy about educational process is to gear a system that facilitates students’ learning. Learning as is understood by an enrichment of their previous knowledge, significantly linked personal experiences that they may keep it permanently and apply in the future. Those approaches are my understanding of the Transformative Learning Theory by Jack Mezirow. This theory is the framework that I have in mind because the subjacent goal of teaching is to make autonomous thinkers ready to interact successfully in a social and working environment.
However, following the latest research on teaching, to obtain these outcomes depends on three main factors (Woolfolk, 2006 p.510):
1. The teacher instructional support
2. The teacher emotional
• Learning requires practice and feedback.
• Challenging promotes growth on cognitive development.
The cognitive development theories are the teaching’s base because to know what is “typical” is the base for designing the strategies for an academic achievement. Therefore, as a teacher, this point of view is very useful in the beginning of each lesson and to scaffold it through formative assessments and questioning. The following are some examples of how I could use the cognitive theories in my classroom:
• To assess the students’ previous knowledge before teaching a new peace of content
• To use formative assessments to place students in new activities and choose strategies to reteach the content or to present the next activities.
• To use Bloom’s Taxonomy --as a cognitive theory that associates cognition’s stages with action words-- to describe the activities and guide the questions through which I develop the lecture.
• To drive students to the accommodation process by connecting the new content with their prior knowledge, and building it by induction or deduction (abstract
In order to that, each person has those eight intelligences, but only uses frequently two or three kinds. Campbell and Dickinson on their book Teaching and learning through multiple intelligences, (2005) offer an efficient system to identify the weak and the strong performance on each intelligence and also give recommendations to improve the student’s weakness. Multiple Intelligences theory suggests that teachers must integrate multimodal learning strategies into their lessons (Campbell and Dickinson, 2003, p.252) in order to suit the learning students’ needs (p.254). Other advantage of that theory is that facilitates the way to incorporate strategies that include the affective and psychomotor domains of learning explained by David Krathwohl and Anita Harrow, respectively. The following are some strategies that I could use to facilitate students’