What

Are the Strengths of Transformational Teaching?

If implemented appropriately, transformation has numerous benefits for everyone involved. Some of these include:

1. Students and faculty work together for the good of the school, neighbourhood, community, and world. Projects move beyond
the transmission and transactional curricula with the intended purpose of making things better for the world. Students
negotiate the projects and how they are implemented.


2. Students develop important dispositions such as problem solving, negotiating strategies, and a transformative attitude
toward issues. Student involvement requires a tremendous amount of critical thinking and conflict resolution and promotes a
conscious social justice attitude toward the world and others.

3. Multiple viewpoints are explored as well as potential issues and problems that could arise in implementing transformation.
Students must consider what potential harm as well as good their efforts might produce. Critical evaluation of the topic,
process, project, and all aspects of a transformational unit are explored.

4. Transformational projects can be used with younger children as well as older students. Specifically, Toni is a teacher in a
low socio-income urban kindergarten in the United States. She implemented several transformational projects with her
kindergarten class throughout the year. She chose four books, which were used to springboard projects with her students.
After reading The Peace Book (Parr, 2004), students created peace journals to share with other classes. Toni read Jamaicas
Find (Havill, 1986) with her class. This book was about loss, and the students decided to establish and run a lost and found
center for their elementary school. Toni also read Everette Andersons Goodbye by Lucille Clifton (1983). This book is about
death, and students made a book about people or pets they had lost to share with the school and their families. Finally, Toni
shared Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge (Fox, 1984), which was about a boy who lived next to a nursing home. The class
adopted a local nursing home and made cards and drew pictures throughout the year with their adopted friends at the nursing
home (Taylor, 2007).


5. Participants encounter a wide variety of resources and materials, including men- tors and others who are working to make a
difference in the world. Transformative work relies heavily on mentoring and encounters with those who are also seeking to
make a difference in ways related to the students own projects and interests.

6. Students learn to continually evaluate and re-evaluate what transformation actually means. Students learn early on that
everything does not always work out the way that they planned it. Some ideas and projects about transformation are easier to
develop than others. They also learn that not everyone agrees on what transformation is, and this has to be carefully
negotiated when attempting to make a difference.

Article Summaries



A Reflection on Transformations
W.L. Chandler

Through Chandlers own form of transformation, he has discovered that in order to truly have a learning environment that is
transformative, the educator must focus on the learner rather than the system and/or resources, look beyond the curriculum
and teach social issues such as morals, ethics responsibility and compassion. The transformative educator must allow the
learners to immerse themselves into the question at hand, draw a conclusion based on their own moral, cultural and religious
compass. Further, providing a safe environment for learners to share, discuss and reflect allows students to be part of the
learning process.

In his article, Chandler takes us through his process of preparing a presentation on transformation in education. His final
inspiration came from a fortune cookie that read, You will be transforming a situation in your life now with a positive
attitude. The words transforming and attitude stood out and transformed his vision of what it takes to truly transform
education. What do we mean by transforming? Who or what needs to be transformed? These are the questions that would
drive his personal transformation.

Transformation in education has taken on many forms in American education. In the past twenty years many efforts to reform
the American education system have come and gone including: A Nation at Risk, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind and the Race
to the Top Program. The main focus of these and other programs were to prepare the learner for the curriculum and schedule.
Many of these proposed transformations also focused on making sure that resources were politically correct and sensitive to
social, political and religious norms. Only content and curriculum is experiencing reform, the stake holders (students and
teachers) are left to reform on their own and are viewed as a secondary concern. The end game for these reforms was to create
a more useful American workforce.

Chandler notes another voice that is calling for a transformation of education, but this time, looking beyond common
curriculum content and making sure that the learner is the primary focus. Transformation needs to affect a learners way of

thinking. Education needs to provide much more than just content. Teachers and schools should be agents of social
regeneration. It is important to take the stance that the first object of any act of learning is that it should serve us in the future.

Chandler refers to the banking concept as one where a teacher simply deposits information into the minds of students, they
in turn are expected to memorise and repeat (Transmission). True educational transformation requires that all participants
have a voice in their own education and are allowed a safe environment to discuss, share and reflect in order to form
understanding.

Chandler took his ideas of educational reform to his seminar and presented to a group of teachers with questioners that asked
about individual pedagogy. They were then instructed to answer and eventually share and discuss which was well received.
Images were then randomly handed out to participants who were then asked to answer questions that were directed at
individuals personal feelings and thoughts about how they read the image. The resulting conversations were similar to the
first but three conclusions were drawn from the second exercise.

1. Participants left feeling appreciative for being given the permission to engage in a non-didactic learning environment.

2. Participants recognized that authority is generative and often learned through inspective and introspective grounding of
knowledge.

3. Participants responded feeling a freedom to engage and question some of the assumptions they had regarding the image.
The image given became participants problem that required involvement.

What have we learned from the inspiration that came from a fortune in a crispy cookie? An attitude of change can move
learners to actively process problems and questions that make up the worldview of adult society. Transformative teaching is
not radical, it is epistemological, it seeks change in not only what one knows but in how one knows, and this is what it will take
to transform education.

Teaching for Transformation

L.M. Christensen and J. Aldridge


In this article, the Christensen and Aldridge describe transformation learning as learning that focuses on how one can make
the world a better place. The authors illustrate that transformative teaching can first and foremost only be taught if the teacher
has already been transformed, it is a state of mind. It allows both teacher and students to interact freely and allows students
the opportunity to take a major role in their own personal education. This project-based form of teaching is mostly concerned
about how the results will make ones world, community, school or home a better place.

The authors write that there are only four types of teaching. They are transmission, transaction, inquiry and transformation.
They describe the various methods in detail and highlight pros and cons of three. Inquiry is not gone into in depth as the
authors feel that inquiry is identical to transformation with one exception. With transformation, students are learning how to
make the world a better place, with inquiry the students are not necessarily focused on making the world a better place, they
are learning about a topic because it interests them. To the authors, transformation is not simply an add on to education, it is a
way of life and an example of good teaching. The chart below highlights the descriptions, roles, pros and cons of the listed
teaching styles.


Description

Transmission
-Traditional
-Student as vessel
-Teaches social conventions

Role of teacher -Direct instruction

-Learning is sequential
-Teachers teach the curriculum,
do not supplement

Role of student -Student is passive

-Student learns the one correct
answer
-Little child/child or
teacher/child interaction
Role of
materials

Strengths

-Students move through

sequential activities
-Activities reinforce the teachers
lessons

Transaction
-Teacher teaches curriculum
but makes more decisions
-Students work in groups, share
ideas, work at activities, present
share what they have learned in a
variety of ways
-Teach curriculum
-Select student materials
-Encourages students to share
with the class

-Work with others, present what

they have learned

-Reflect everyday life:

storybooks, newspapers,
magazines
-Materials are used to represent
learning: web page, fact sheet,
game, mural, etc.
-Easy to follow, requires little
-Students interact and develop
preparation
oral language skills
-Format is familiar to parents,
-Students participate in research
allowing for easy communication and determine how to represent

Transformation
- Teaching students to make a
difference in the world, while
making a difference in the world
-Seeks social justice
-Teacher must be transformed
-Works to make a difference in
student lives
-Provide experiences which
promote social justice
-Carefully considers the values
and beliefs of students
-Actively help in curricular
development
-Students suggest ways to make a
difference
-Projects are developed through
student suggestions
-Used to explore change and
make a difference in the world
-Are authentic i.e. internet,
literature
-May include human resources or
individuals
-Projects make the surrounding
word better
-Students learn important skills:
negotiation, critical thinking,

Negatives

-It is easy to document student

progress
-Knowledge is factual making
progress easy to measure
-Efficient means to teach social
and conventional knowledge
(information that must be
learned from others)

learning
-Learning in-depth
-Students learn to reflect and
make decisions
-Students use higher order
thinking

- Limits creative thinking

- Overused
- Not social - does not promote
oral language development
-Doesnt encourage critical
thinking
- Focus on academic, not on
social/emotional development
- If mandated loss of teacher
autonomy
-Students do not construct their
own knowledge

-Is a more involved teaching

method
-May not be favored by
institutions of learning
-Learning is in-depth, may be
difficult to cover all curricula
-Is not efficient is standardized
test is the marker of success

problem solving
-Students learn to explore several
points of view
-Can be used with a variety of age
groups
-Uses a variety of resources
-Students learn to evaluate, and
reevaluate their learning and
work
-There are many forms and many
definitions of transformation
-Research is required, or well
intentioned plans can fail
-Projects need to be appropriate
for all, so they can provide
transformation for all involved
-Must be cautious not to
unintentionally marginalize other
groups