What is Constructive-Developmental Pedagogy

Many times students enroll in courses with the sole intention of learning new content or skills. While this is a reasonable goal, a longer term vision for students towards one of a transformed individual educates the whole person. Transformation through education has been studied for years (Kegan, 1994; Baxter-Magolda & King, 2004; and Belenky et al., 1986). This chapter is designed to examine the framework that explains the process of the transformational growth of students in becoming self-authoring. This chapter will also discuss the scholarly role that transformation plays for instructors through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Both theories have similar requirements for reflection, dialogue with peers and continuous growth. The need to design experiences that explicitly support students to reflect on their assumptions, consider alternative perspectives, develop a content language, and make connections between theory and practice will be discussed. The impact of explicitly making these ideas transparent to students illustrates the importance of modeling and valuing reflective feedback by instructors to enhance the learning process. Ideally, well-designed course dynamically shapes instructors’ thinking about their teaching and students‘ ways of thinking about their learning.