Aiden M. A. Thornton
Tags: complexity, leadership, hierarchical complexity, ego development, Aiden M. A. Thornton, Lectica
Posts Tagged ‘ego development’
Principles and Practices for Developmentally Aware Teaching and Mentoring in Higher Education
Abigail Lynam
Understanding one’s own development as an educator, as well as the developmental diversity of students can have a significant impact on how educators approach teaching, mentorship, and design learning experiences. Developmentally informed educators recognize the phases of development that students are likely to be in and adapt their teaching accordingly. Recognizing developmental diversity, they adjust the outcomes, processes, and mentoring to meet the students where they are developmentally. Without this awareness and knowledge, educational programs are more likely to teach for particular forms of development, which provide an appropriate stretch for some students but not for others. In addition, educators may be more likely to project their own developmental needs onto students, teaching who they are, rather than who is in front of them. This article offers a review of adult development theory, specifically O’Fallon’s STAGES model, and its application to teaching and learning. It includes the results of research on the impact of learning about adult development for faculty and students in a graduate program and the findings of additional research on the meaning-making and perspective-taking of educators through the stages of development. It concludes with practical insights and principles for teaching and mentoring developmentally.
Tags: ego development, Lynam, developmentally aware teaching, constructive development theory, Higher Education, adult development, transformative learning., stages, adult learning
The STAGES Specialty Inventories: Robustness to Variations in Sentence Stems
Terri O’Fallon and Tom Murray
The STAGES developmental model is a variation of prior ego development frameworks that defines developmental levels in terms of three parameters: object of awareness (concrete, subtle, or metaware), individual vs. collective focus, and active/passive orientation. STAGES, like prior frameworks, uses a sentence completion test (SCT) assessment. Prior frameworks rely on exemplar-based scoring that is closely tied into the specific sentence stems. In contrast, STAGES scoring system is based on language properties that do not depend on the sentence stem. Thus STAGES is the first such assessment to be able to freely incorporate alternative sentence stems without the labor intensive process of discovering the full range of specific responses. Though the STAGES theory and assessment methodology easily allow for using alternative sentence stems, the validity of using alternative stems needs to be shown. In this paper we report on internal consistency studies of several “specialty protocols” which are SCT surveys with 6 to 10 of the original 36 stems replaced by stems focused on a particular specially area. Results show strong reliability scores, via the Cronbach’s alpha statistic, for six specialty inventories, on: leadership and organizations, love, education, psychological reflection, climate change, and a children’s SCT.
Tags: children's and adult assessments, protocol variations, stages, ego development, Murray, O'Fallon, Cronbach’s alpha validity
Luhmann’s Life Work and Tier Patterns: The Analysis of Differences and Contingent Patterns
Roman Angerer
The article undertakes an archeological investigation into the writings of the German Sociologist and cybernetic Systems-thinker Niklas Luhmann. His writ-ings spanning almost four decades of uninterrupted stage growth and text pro-duction are good fodder to dissect ruptures between and plateaus of semantic-syntactic structures called developmental stages. By this an architecture is exem-plarily revealed that spans four Tiers including sixteen Stages with four sub-phases at each niveau of relative stability which sometimes is called Center of Gravity. The article is structured as an oscillation between genetic and structural-ist phases that enrich Luhmann`s Life Work by multiple references to other thinkers at the integral and post-integral stages. The final section that then pre-sents the complete model is also a critique of other developmental models specif-ically directed towards and suggesting critical revision of Terri O`Fallons STAG-ES model. This happens through introducing four common fallacies develop-mental models commit, when trying to appropriate the transcendental and phylo-genetic realm preconditioning our conscious growth, through the contingencies our very self-referential and themselves-thematizing observations. Additionally, in discerning between genesis and structure, descenders and ascenders, inside and outside perspectives and ultimately an Aristotelian and an Platonist Type of stage growth it is the attempt of a seamless intervention between both modes, uniting them and ultimately deluding them of their most prominent errors: the ne-cessity of a first distinction mistaken for the creator and their ultimate purpose mistaken for the divine.
Tags: stages, ego development, Angerer, Archeology, Nicholas Luhmann, semantics, text analysis, universal grammar
A Brief Overview of Developmental Theory, or What I Learned in the FOLA Course
Jonathan Reams
Abstract: This article describes the history and development of developmental theory from a lay person perspective. It covers some of the main strands of how developmental theory has grown, focusing on ego stage theories and dynamic skill theory as the main examples of soft and hard stage models. It also touches on how measures of these models relate to the theories. Reflections on the relative merits of each strand are considered, as well as implications for broadening the scope of awareness of developmental theory among the larger population of integrally informed practitioners.
Tags: Jonathan Reams, developmental theory, dynamic skill theory, ego development, metrics
