Compare and Contrast

While taking courses in my graduate studies in school counseling, I learned a lot about Piaget and his theory. For this assignment, I chose to look more in depth at King and Kitchener’s Reflective Judgment Model. I chose this theory because it deals with reflection, which was a very important component of my interview with an adult educator. I agreed with the person I interviewed when she stated that she felt adults learn best through reflection. I wanted to look deeper into this area.

According to King and Kitchener’s model, “people move through seven stages, with the final two stages encompassing the more mature thinking patterns of what King and Kitchener call reflective thinking” (Merriam, Caffarella, & Baumgartner, 2007, p.332). They focused on how people make judgments about complex issues or problems. The first three stages are labeled as pre-reflective thinking. During these stages, people view knowledge as coming from authority figures. In the first stage, knowledge is concrete. The beliefs do not need to be justified and are considered to be absolute. Stage two assumes that knowledge is absolute and can be obtained through authority figures or through personal experience. During this stage, most issues have a right answer. The third stage also has an absolute answer, but it may be temporarily uncertain until knowledge is obtained from an authority figure or observed. In all three of these stages, knowledge is absolute. There is one right answer.

Stages four and five are referred to as quasi-reflective reasoning, where people have more subjective thinking. In stage four, knowledge is uncertain and determined by giving reasons and using evidence, but evidence is often chosen to fit an established beli...

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...d brought about a wide variety of ideas for projects and assignments. Though my classroom teaching experience is with middle school students, I see no reason why this approach wouldn’t work with adults as well.

I believe both King and Kitchener’s Reflective Judgment Model and Levinson’s Age-Graded Model both contain the element of reflection and allow for a great deal of collaboration among adult learners. I believe both of these elements are essential to being successful as an adult learner and an adult educator. Reflection and collaboration were both central pieces of my interview with an adult educator. I hope to find a way to incorporate both of these elements into my style as an adult educator. I truly believe we learn best from past experiences and both of these theories allow students to reflect and use critical thinking to move forward in their lives.