This week’s additional reading, “How to Teach Adults: 15 secrets” (Busy Teacher, 2015) discusses how to deal with adults in a classroom where the learners are older than the teacher. This has certainly been my case over the past years that I have been teaching basic computer skills to adult learners. From my experience, adults come with a baggage of experience.
In a nutshell, the article describes how one of the most common mistakes that younger teachers commit when teaching older students is that they provide examples that are outside of sphere of experience of the learners. When I started teaching the course, I re-used some of the material that I use to teach secondary school students. I noticed that the I could not engage the students as well as I had done with the younger students.
To mitigate this, I changed the approach. To my more mature audience, I have provided an instruction pack that with detailed examples of how to do things. During the lesson, I engaged the students by adding more hands-on group activities. Each group could choose a topic to their liking to practice (such as typing out a recipe or tabulating the results of the football season). Once the students were able to use analogies that they were familiar with, they assimilated the subject much quicker.
The approach that I have found the most effective with adult learners is one which relies on practical tasks that complement the theoretical aspects of the lesson. I have found that using this approach, adults learn better and are more predisposed to engage and ask questions.
References:
Busy Teacher, (2015). How to Teach Adults: 15 Secrets, Busy Teacher. Retrieved from http://busyteacher.org/7273-teach-adults-15-secrets.html. Last accessed 10 May 2015.
No comments:
Post a Comment