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 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 professional development might not be the way forward regarding educator professional growth. However, we continue to follow the model of setting aside a few days a year to rush through a learning topic that supposedly will meet everyone’s needs. We preach differentiation but don’t apply it to our peer learning opportunities.

Moving on from current professional development practices, we need to focus on the learning needs of adults, looking at how we can design learning communities with ongoing learning practices instead of one-shot PD days.

One of the pleasant 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 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 want to connect and get 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 other teachers are in the room. This sometimes leads to their going in different directions, which means that the session provider must diligently work individually and with the group simultaneously. 🙂 Look to support technology learning in one-to-one situations for many adult learners.
• Please work with the practices already taking place in the classrooms and build on them by facilitating discussion and sharing with the team.
• Immediate application, ongoing practice, and follow-up support of adult learning work.
• Adults need to guide and direct their learning.
• Adults deserve differentiated instruction that meets their learning styles and speed, just as all learners do.