justplainbil

Just Plain Bill

Adult Learners = Little Kids in Big Clothes

Over the years, I’ve learned that many adults are just little kids in big clothes when they’re in an educational setting. Many adults tend to regress to behavior they displayed in their early school experiences. I find this to be especially true when it comes to their degree of participation in class activities, the challenge in “keeping still”, and their tendency to act out.

I spent the first 18 years of my professional life working with children in recreational and educational settings, and I was fortunate to have learned how to establish and manage an interactive, engaging and successful learning environment for my students.  These techniques were successful with both “captive” participants - school children - and “non-captive” participants - recreational participants and adults in an organizational setting.

What I mastered while working as a learning and development professional (a fancy word for teacher) transferred to my work with adults. It’s been said that the motivation for learning is different for adults than for children, but I’ve found over the past 40+ years that there’s little basic difference between the two groups.

Early research suggested that children were “empty vessels needing to be filled” (theory since rebutted by Piaget, Montessori, Erikson and many others), while adults are “full vessels needing to be drawn out”. Malcolm Knowles expounded on that theory, coining the word “andragogy” to differentiate the theory of adult learning from that of “pedagogy”, or learning theory related to children.

So, what does all of that information have to do with how best to “teach” adults, recognizing that many of them will have regressed to behavior that could be an obstacle and even disruptive if not managed effectively?

 My approach to educating both children and adults includes:

·     Building TRUST between the teacher and the students by getting to know the learners and by including appropriate humor - especially of the self-deprecating kind

·     Insuring ENGAGEMENT by asking questions, rhetorical ones as well as subject-related ones, to build upon what the learners already know

·     Challenging COMMITMENT by providing the opportunity for the participants to apply what they have learned – either new knowledge or enhanced understanding

Finally, I don’t answer many questions directly, choosing to re-direct responses from colleagues by asking “what do others of you think?” I’ve found the majority of the time the answers come from the group, with more weight given to the answers from their colleagues. It’s not so important what I, the teacher knows. The students can’t “take me with them”; they can only take what them what they’ve experienced.