Adults are self-directed and want to be free to direct themselves in their learning experiences.
This general statement could mean a variety of things for the teaching/learning environment:
- The students should NOT be dependent on the instructor for the knowledge and learning involved. The instructor facilitates the learning by providing authentic tasks and content.
Facilitates: Synonyms include make easy, ease, make possible, smooth the progress of, help, aid and assist.
- To facilitate learning or make it easier (notice it’s the process of learning and not the content) instructors could provide small chunks of content in various formats (text, audio, video and websites).
- Provide a series of purposeful scaffolding activities to move students from beginning concepts/tasks through intermediate ones to hard concepts/tasks building on prior knowledge.
- Provide study guides, online study sessions or groups, online office hours for students prior to tests.
- Provide students the opportunity to take a test when they are ready for the assessment by opening the test for the entire length of the unit rather than having it opened for just a few days.
- Provide “practice tests” or self-assessments prior to the test so students can identify areas of further study.
- Instructors should provide activities and assessments that are relevant to the content and real life and identify how the assignment connects to work or life experiences.
- Instructors could provide assignment choices for students to choose the task that is most relevant to them.
What are you doing to facilitate learning for your adult students?
For me, the start of each new course represents an invitation to students, "See how much you can learn on your own from the interaction you'll have with the content, with your peers, and, lastly, with me, your "guide on the side."
ReplyDeleteI support two practices to encourage self-direction:
1. I use rubrics for every task except for self-graded quizzes, which count very, very little, and can be taken multiple times until the desired grade is reached. I also stick to rubric wording when I grade and give feedback on the grading. The student's score and mine should match exactly.
2. Although CCCOnline requires that I participate daily in the discussion forums, and students appear to like it, I am not a proponent of having teachers participate that much in the discussions. Instead, I am an advocate of becoming nearly invisible in the forums, dipping in to challenge the discussion to go deeper with what is called a "landscape post." A landscape post does not summarize or approve or synthesize the discussion. Instead, it takes a theme from the comments and challenges students to take it further with a question. In my opinion, when the teacher dialogs with students in the forums, students tend to depend on her comments and to strive to please her rather than challenge the premises in the prompt or revealed by peers.
Leecy