Ballad in Plain E

This was one of the best sessions I attended. Dr. Ilda Carreiro King is an educational and development psychologist who specialises in helping teachers learn how to teach more successfully. In this session, she focused on learning styles of adults versus children. Here are some of the key points she made about characteristics of adult learners:

• It cannot be overemphasized that adults need to know what’s in it for them; what is the practical benefit. They want to see current, precise examples that are relevant to their work
• Adults generally don’t care about knowledge for its own sake. The best motivators are interest and selfish benefit
• It is critical that adults not feel singled out or intimidated
• Peer learning is a powerful tool because it uses accountability and shares the risk of “looking stupid”

Points about teaching:

• When teaching, you will default to the way you, yourself, were taught, even though you may know better
• You should always be prepared to vary your schedule. Try not to say “I’m going to cover that later”
• Offer many opportunities for “Processing breaks” where learners talk to each other about a topic. This cements the ideas for them and also uses peer accountability.
• Never put an expert with a novice. If you had twenty students and they were ranked from 1 (novice) to 20 (expert), you would pair 1 with 11, 2 with 12, etc.
• You should judge your teaching success on how well the average person has learned. The top 15-20% can already learn well no matter what.

Techniques:

• Paired learning: one person reads instructions from a script, the other follows the instructions. You would think that only the person DOING is learning, but actually, the “teacher” learns more because he is having to follow and analyse the steps the “doer” is taking
• Adults are less interested in survey courses, and more interested in in-depth training on specific topics
• Use one dataset throughout multiple tasks
• The learner’s opportunity to do discuss, do hands-on practice, and then coach someone else in the same task dramatically improves his actual learning.

Amazing session, probably the best at the conference!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 21st, 2008 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Conference Notes, sla2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.