How Do Adults Learn?
Differently than children is the obvious answer yet we often don’t remember this when creating professional learning opportunities for teachers. Picture a library or other large room with adults listening to a guest speaker hour after hour. This is a case where adults and children are similar. Direct instruction and passive so called professional development don’t get the job done. However, we continue to follow the model of setting aside a few days a year to rush through a topic of learning that supposedly will meet everyone’s needs. We preach differentiation but don’t apply it to our own peer learning opportunities.
Instead of discussing professional development, I will focus on the learning needs of adults leaving how we design learning communities as an ongoing processes as opposed to one shot PD days.
One of the nice aspects of my instructional technology graduate program was a seminar class where we studied the learning needs of adult learners. The following are some of the main points I remember from the class and from the past few years working with teachers individually and in small groups.
- The purpose of the learning must be relevant and useful.
- The adult learner brings a vast amount of life experience to the learning that in many cases will be applied to any new learning.
- If you really want to connect and lead to buy in, individualize the learning to one to one and small teaching team groups.
- Many teachers sitting at a bank of computers for a PD session quickly forget that there are other teachers in the room. This sometimes leads to their going in different directions which means that the session provider must be diligent in working individually and with the group at the same time.
Really look to support technology learning in one to one situations for many adult learners. - Work with the practices already taking place in the classrooms and build on them by facilitating discussion and sharing from the team.
- Immediate application and on going practice and support of the learning really works for adults.
- Adults need to guide and direct their own learning.
- Adults deserve differentiated instruction that meets their learning styles and learning speed just as all learners do.
[...] See his blog post on which lists several factors we need to keep in mind when working with adult learners. And as [...]
I am a high school science teacher from Minnesota. I just wanted to say that I loved your analogy of an adult listening to a speaker for hours. I see it very often–adults must sit and listen to what the person has to say, no matter how dry or uninteresting it may be. Students are the same–they do not want to listen to us talk for an hour on a topic that they care nothing about.
Hi Natalie,
Thanks for your comment. What would happen if our PD leaders asked their teachers how they would like to learn? I think we would have a very different approach to professional learning.