Galveston Independent School Effective Leader

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The business narrative advanced by Bloom’s and Kolb’s theories relates very perfectly to my work as an office manager of special initiatives in Galveston Independent School.

According to Bloom, there exists three spheres of influence in experiential learning which are the cognitive that involves the mental skills or Knowledge, the affective which involves growth in feelings or emotional areas relating to attitude, and the psychomotor which deals with manual and physical skills.

All the said aspects are related to my work. On the other hand, (Kolb 17) acknowledges experiential learning work of other writers like Rogers, Jung and Piaget who wrote books on psychology. Thus in his writing, Kolb’s theories relate very much to my work as a director manager.

These are aspects that I will expound in the following paragraphs. In understanding human behavior and helping others to learn, Kolb’s concepts have helped me to perform my duties as a facilitator by running meetings and setting round robin discussions and conference calls.

My work has also been enhanced by Bloom’s theories and they have also enabled me to use my cognitive, affective and psychomotor capabilities. In the end I have become effective in my communication skills. In essence the mastery of these two theories has provided the basis for this paper.

It is by understanding Bloom’s work that I used his concept on cognitive operations and engaged with taxonomy in categorizing people. This was because I understood various principles that affected behavior and perceptions.

Bloom’s concepts are still used and accepted today in taxonomy as it identifies six levels of learning which are knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation (Kottke and Schuster, 23; Granello, 18).

(Kolb’s 26) theory on the other hand forms the foundation that one’s experience is an important method in influencing certain concepts which can be used by an individual for inference and active experimentation. In relation to my work, Bloom’s concept of taxonomy has empowered me.

This has been through my experience of creating purchase orders and purchasing stuff, undertaking budget reconciliations and financial statements. It has enabled me analyze it, synthesize and finally evaluate all that I have done.

The method has really made me a competent director and thus I have become a value adding employee to the school. In addition to my professional competence, Kolb’s theory brought me to an understanding of myself in relation to how I work with others.

Using his four phases in his learning cycle, I have grasped the concepts of what I learn. It has helped me know how to maximize my discoveries in the work environment. It taught me how to solve work problems and work as a team member, manage conflicts and misunderstandings and thus improve personal and professional relationships and finally make informed choices in my career.

In reviewing Kolb’s explanation that naturally people’s preferences in learning style vary, one has to note that the different people in practice may prefer a certain unique learning style. It is in line with this that I applied my responsibility for maintaining, leading and managing various sectors.

Kolb’s learning style which is designed to help me understand how I learn best in educational settings and everyday life, has made me reflect and perceive my life experiences. I sternly remember my place in the learning cycle represents the dynamic ways that I have engaged in the learning process. Events and instances where the learning has taken place have been vividly presented in the following paragraphs.

I recall my leadership experience in the school, having been a manager; I chose to do work with the employees confidently. I thought it was easy, but through the experiences with the staff members I learned a lot. I was initially quiet observing and listening to how the culture of the school has been. I felt the urge to contribute when I realized the discussions were not making headway.

When I was introduced I got the opportunity to give my experience of working with people and how we could make a plan for the year. Here, I was incorporating the assimilation and accommodative style. I discovered that whenever I felt there was no new information, I usually got into my accommodative style to solve problems intuitively even though I didn’t have all the right data.

With the upcoming meetings I had all things in plan until I realized that working with the adult was not as easy as I thought. I realized that each adult had his own way of doing things. It was the first time I never felt frustrated working with a group. With all my plans and past experiences working while with groups, I found myself looking for other ways on making the group work with a schedule.

In the process of coming up with innovative approaches towards my goals, I found that I needed to work with the staff members. I decided not to get involved with the wrangles of leadership in the group but rather put my ideas into practice by making activities work.

We brainstormed with the staff to get what they would like to do, and I found myself changing my target group from those who were rebellious and worked with those who believed in me. Kolb’s learning has been helpful to my learning in that I can now look at my experience and use the cycle to make me understand my weaknesses and blockages that are present in the journey towards achieving my goals in life.

It has also helped me to effectively work with others as a team. I understand that as an accommodator, I need other learning styles present in others so as to get the best of my learning and growth. In emphasis (Bloom 17) defines education from the idea that acquisition of knowledge through experience involves maturity which involves learning new behaviors that are believed to be goals in the learning process.

Therefore in this, an adult can be said to be one who has been transformed by what he has gone through from his experiences and one who is able to relate these experiences with that which is around him.

The process of being an educated adult provided me with the process of experiential learning which Kolb describes as a movement from experience, to reflection, to generalization, and to the experimentation that engages the learner as an agent of education rather than the passive recipient of education (Kolb, 34).

In connection with the above, (Paulo Freire 1970) believes the educated adult is able to see contradictions that lead to being passive and able to come to terms with reality. This means that the knowledge and learning goes beyond being dormant in the transformation of issues and realities around them. They begin to put things in perspective thus contribute to their present situation towards growth and liberation.

Therefore as an educated adult inserted in a school environment, I was able to analyze issues from the cultural, political, economical, social and spiritual realm thus leading to transformation through action and reflection. I was constantly reflecting and the cycle continued to become a lifelong method of searching, seeking solutions and answers to life’s problems.

As (Bloom 41) points out, the cognitive level involves reflective awareness as it develops the intellectual skills. This enabled me to demonstrate competence as an individual in my area of duty. In using the affective sphere of influence (Krathwohl, Bloom, Masia, 21) noted that it is the manner by which we deal with our feelings and emotions.

In my daily running of my director and managerial duties, I recall the theory and try to become aware of my own motivations and attitudes that influence my values. In retrospect, the two writers show the relationship between experience and learning, which is a question to think about in my area of leadership and in my daily life.

Using the ideas of the two writers Bloom and Kolb, I found myself having a point of departure, and tried to explore many of the questions that were ignited by their writing. It brought a valuable discussion in making me begin to think about experience, and some of the ways I can use it to learn.

Taking a look at the question of experience and knowledge in Bloom and Kolb led me to consider how the experience related to my own experiences, and how they were helpful in a program such as a school.

Reflecting on the writers helped me realize that not all experiences are equal and often some events are miss-educative that is, they do not contribute to further growth. This is evident in one example of a professor who is accompanied by an illiterate adult in a canoe and by asking him his knowledge of physics, mathematics so as to propel the canoe; he finds the guy does not know and names him redundant.

The illiterate then jumps into the water and starts swimming away leaving the professor with a question, ‘do you know how to swim?’ Alas! all his theories could not help him. This professor may discover that he has to relearn a number of tasks, simply because he led a somewhat sheltered life in the academic world of books, and did not know how things were done elsewhere.

This example helped me to see one of the primary dilemmas about experience in that, seeing the educative value of a particular experience is difficult when it is undertaken, without looking at things from a much broader perspective.

As Bloom and Kolb suggests, all experiences must be evaluated in terms of what they contribute toward future growth, further learning that is truly educative experiences are those that prepare us to perform the broadest range of new tasks in the world. In doing this, one must consider all that life has to offer, including its challenges. In short, thinking outside the box.

Another way in Kolb’s theory is that of making comparisons and generalizations which follows the principle of asking the benefits of these educative experiences. Asking how I can judge the educative potential of my practical experience, can prepare me to extensively gauge my daily future work experiences.

The dimension of learning that determines the educative quality of looking at my managerial experience is another aspect that enabled me to generalize and compare my experience with that of others. This led me to consider my own capacity to learn new things even though I was in the position of leadership.

I got used to the application of these new learning in different situations. In comparison, I was able to connect different experiences in my environment by looking at similar problems and methods used and thereby making significant steps to enhancing progress in my work.

In connection to the example of the professor, I realized my past mistakes. If I had used the theory in being exposed to different scenarios and situations, I would have done things differently. Using my cognitive, affective and the psychomotor influences in coordinating all of my faculties helped a lot.

This meant that I had to apply skills required by being practical in my precision and in execution. It is this knowledge in my work that will make me become better prepared for new situations in future. It has brought me a critical realization that there are often many different ways of doing things, and that being a good manager means more than simply following a certain formula of Physics or Mathematics.

Certainly, having a wider range of experiences to draw upon and assessing new situations made me capable of comparing various experiences to see what the common elements were. In the end I began to derive general principles about being a good manager.

The ability of being a manager depends on the learning from a variety of different settings and comparing these experiences to derive certain principles and generalizations. These help in coping with new situations encountered in one’s daily work encounters. I now know that the wider the range of experiences I draw upon, the better the principles and generalizations I discover present in my learning environment.

In my own assertion, the act of forming life generalizations from comparisons of my own knowledge is a critical step in the process of learning from life experiences. In addition, by reviewing my working environment I have seen that there are connections between different ways of learning previous experience. A manager involved in having a hands-on learning style derives unforgettable insights.

Considering the educative quality of my experiences and my learning from a particular experience in my work site depended mostly on what I knew before. My primary and secondary aspects of my experiences in question had to be weighed in my work experience.

In the end I realized that it helped me to see something about similar problems that I did not understand before. This is because it added to my understanding of a problem, and enhanced my ability to solve problems.

The yearning to be a more effective leader and apprentice comes from my strengths and the various methods that I have been able to learn, thereby eliminating the one way approach of my leadership style. In this way, the learning I undergo everyday becomes a further growth of my perceptions thus I become more competent in my leadership status.

Works Cited

Bloom, B. S. Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay Co Inc, 1956:35-40.Print.

Bloom, B. S., Engelhart, M. D., Furst, F. J., Hill, W. H., & Krathwohl, D. R. Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Cognitive Domain. New York, McKay/Longmans Green, 1956:12-37. Print.

Freire, Paulo. Education for critical consciousness. [1st American] ed. A Continuum book. New York: Seabury Press, 1973.1-27. Print.

Granello, D. H. “Promoting cognitive complexity in graduate written work: using Bloom’s taxonomy as a pedagogical tool to improve literature reviews.” Counselor Education & Supervision. 2001: 40(4): 292-307. Print.

Kolb, D. A. Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development’ Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1984:22-46. Print.

Kottke, J. L., & Schuster, D. H. “Developing tests for measuring Bloom’s learning outcomes.” Psychological reports. 1990: 66: 27-32. Print.

Krathwohl, D. R., Bloom, B. S., & Masia, B. B.). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, the Classification of Educational Goals. Handbook II: Affective Domain. New York: David McKay Co, Inc, 1973:12-23. Print.

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Galveston Independent School Effective Leader

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