This chapter focuses on implementing transformative pedagogy as a solution to support students in their learning rather than feeding into their learning anxiety. The officers who join the Ecole de guerre (French War College) have been taught English through communicative and transactional methods, acquiring grammar and linguistics rather than the ability to communicate in the language. Provided in this chapter is a description of the implementation of a new approach, TLLT, based on learner autonomy and the lessons learned in the process: (1) the need for caution in analyzing the learning environment to avoid introducing a method without properly adapting it, (2) the transition from one method to another that allows the metanoic process and transformation to happen, and (3) all all the key players - the head of department/course designer, the faculty, the leadership of the college and, last but not least, the students experienced the metanoia. The most important lesson? When students realize that TLLT is about transforming their frame of reference and not re-setting who they are, their motivation rockets through the roof.

For language teachers who are already convinced about why to include transformative learning goals, this chapter will help to clarify what we know about how these sometimes-elusive learning goals can be scaffolded within our existing instruction. Language teachers interested in including transformative learning goals in their language classes should know that the transformative process is difficult to predict and to measure. However, instructors can intentionally and even successfully nurture transformation without straying far from widely accepted classroom practices by taking a more critical approach. Authentic texts can be useful for promoting disorienting dilemmas when they are at the learners' cognitive and proficiency level and include feasible tasks. Critical reflection is also essential to transformative learning and can be encouraged through structured written reflection. This reflection can take place in the L1 or L2. Finally, instructors can motivate students to take action by asking them to think about next steps.

This chapter reviews the basics of cognition, showing how old ideas about learning as storehouses of information, standing at the ready to address problems, have given way to much more complex notions about how our brains make meaning of information by attaching it – or not – to existing mental models. Meaning-making is not only vital to our survival as a species but also presents a challenge to our cognitive development. How we change our mental models is known as transformative learning, arguably the most important theory on adult learning in the last half-century.