Change is Hard. Really Hard.

I’ve written about this before from my own perspective and want to take a few minutes to consider how that can help my learners.

Learning is all about change and in order to be successful at learning, learners will experience a change.  Some of those changes will be small and others large and all-encompassing in terms of challenging fundamental beliefs people hold.  In the community development field, transformative learning can support opportunities to create pathways to social change (Mezirow, 1991). However, by their nature, transformative change includes elements of significant change.  Learners need time to process and reflect on the new information while they adapt their personal perspectives.

Giving learners early and small ways to consider how the new information can be understood may help them through a period of transformative change.  Check out Simon Sinek's idea to approach change https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUmTQ-86-YI

Brookfield includes a small section in his book called “Create Situations in which Students Succeed” (Brookfield, 2015, p. 234) where teachers are asked to consider creating a basic scaffolding process for success. 

Butterfly

For my own teaching, I think helping learners to start the transformative learning process by simply having an activity where the goal is to share or identify something that is new or surprising in the new information might be beneficial. This could support a resistant learner to simply share a new piece of information from their own perspective (no wrong answers!) and count that as a success; starting with the small success allows for the mind to be open to further reflection.  And a mind open for reflection is open to change and to learn.

Keep Shining!

References:

Brookfield, S. (2015). The skillful teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom (Third edition). Jossey-Bass.

Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.