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Putting the Adult in Learning

child and adult learner
Can an adult and child learn in the same ways?

After two decades teaching "children," I moved to "higher" education where the line between children and adults is fuzzy. For the last decade, I have been involved in adult education and lifelong learning. The "adult” adjective is significant. 

Adults face a lot more barriers during the learning process. There is the transition back to education, the cost of it, the time needed to devote to it, and all the normal distractions of full or part-time jobs, kids and—hopefully—a social life.

My lifelong learning students are often age 55+ but my theory is that lifelong learning begins as soon as you leave formal learning. You can be a lifelong learner at 19, 39, or 79 or any age, but in any case, you are definitely an "adult learner."

Pedagogy is the methods and practice of teaching children. Andragogy: the methods and practice of teaching adults. But as I said, that line
when a student no longer a child, but an adult is not hard and clear. We often view high school graduation as the entry into adulthood, but anyone who has taught college students and also taught younger students will tell you that there are often more similarities than differences.

Andragogy, a concept dating to the 1960s and Malcolm Knowles, is important because it recognizes that adult learners are different and that these differences are extremely important. Here are some things that andragogy and adult learning theory stress.

ADULTS:   
    Are more independent than children when it comes to learning.
    Are capable of critical thinking (unlike some children) but are still interested in the “correct answer."
    Learn more slowly but just as effectively because they have more life experience and deeply ingrained stereotypes and ideas.
    Must be given respect as adults and for their life experience or lack of experience.
    Need classrooms that embrace active learning, including hands-on activities.
    Learn material that is relevant for their needs.
    Are driven less by grades (performance goal orientation) and more by understanding (mastery goal orientation).

My lifelong learning students are often age 55+ but as I said earlier, my theory is that lifelong learning begins as soon as you leave formal learning. Of course, some lifelong learning still occurs in a classroom, a school or a course that you pay for or can do for free.

In my formal education courses, I studied basic human growth and development theories. You can study Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, Malcolm Knowles' work, and Piaget’s stages of cognitive development. 

There are some basics I mention to people who are going to be teaching in any formal or informal setting.

Children need more guidance. Children are just not physiologically capable of performing certain skills or critical thinking. They benefit from active learning and student-centered learning situations. But so do many adults. Adults can handle learning something theoretical and then seeing its application. Children prefer the application and then the theory behind it.

Back in the end of the 20th century, I became very interested in learning styles. The theory is that learners of all ages (maybe more so as adults where they have options) think they have a learning style. An overly simplified breakdown is that you might be a visual, kinesthetic, or auditory learner. More recently, some research now suggests learning styles are a myth. Maybe, but I still like the theory. 

Adults learn differently from children, but "pedagogy” is still often used for learning of all age levels. I think that is a mistake.

As part of my job starting in 2000 at NJIT, I organized and conducted training for professors and some of that included "pedagogy." It was all new to them. I usually had to define the word and I certainly had to define andragogy. They found it interesting and admitted that they had never had any education courses. they "tried to what their good professors had done and not do what the bad ones had done." Professors who voluntarily attended training tended to want to learn new things. Some professors never attended and might say that it all sounded like the training required to teach K-12.

Learning to Teach

teacher at board
   Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a forum newsletter series on teaching written by Beth McMurtrie that had a post recently summarizing what they have learned after 5 years of doing the series. As it states, teaching is "An Ever-Changing Profession" and yet I find that many things about teaching are still the same as when I first went into a classroom in 1975.

When I moved out of the classroom as a full-time teacher in 2000, one of my roles was to teach professors. Though the department I ran was instructional technology, I was also tasked with holding sessions on pedagogy. At first, I wondered if college faculty would have a real interest in topics like assessment, grading strategies, creating assignments, and leading discussions in the classroom or online. But in the early sessions, those who did attend (it was voluntary most of the time) often said things like "I try to do what my best teachers do and not do what the bad ones did" and "I never took any courses in how to teach." Those faculty were interested and had spent their academic lives focused on their subject matter and, especially at STEM institutions like NJIT, research and getting grants were the real foci of concern and attention.

It is noted that "teaching has become an increasingly public enterprise," but some say “teaching is a private act.” Certainly, the K-12 classroom has become more public and parents and the community have always played a greater role in what happens in classrooms than compared in colleges. The newsletter points to possible changes to that dynamic, citing "find a teaching buddy, bring the department together to talk about teaching, create teaching communities across campus."

The pandemic and classes going online K-20 put teaching practices more in the public and into homes. Again, that was more so in K-12, but also for higher ed. Schools also held workshops to help faculty shift their teaching and some virtual support groups appeared with topics ranging from how to use Zoom to how to grade participation online.

Though I "learned to teach" as an undergraduate with an education minor in order to be a certified secondary school teacher, I really learned how in my field experiences and even more so in my first few years of actually being a full-time teacher. Like those professors, it took being in a classroom, creating lessons, grading work, and all the day-to-day tasks for me to really learn to teach. But I did have all the theories, practices, and philosophies before I became a teacher to refer to and use. I had tools.

I used a lot of that training in doing my own training sessions for professors. They were always somewhat amazed at all the research that had been done in pedagogy. They were more surprised at hearing there was such a thing as andragogy which addressed the age group many of them were teaching. It shouldn't have surprised them that there was a vast amount of educational research available, after all, it was what most of them did in their own fields. I always suspected that some of that surprise came from an attitude that teaching was less of a science and more of an "art" - like being able to draw or play an instrument. The "A" in STEAM had not found its way into STEM.

The newsletter has covered research universities creating teaching tracks to try to improve educational outcomes and reduce faculty burnout. Innovative forms of teaching, such as inclusive teaching and active learning, are ways that faculty begin to rethink classroom strategies.

Didactic Learning

brain theory
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

When I was in a doctoral program in pedagogy, I recall didactics being a subject of discussion. I saw it mentioned recently and tried to recall what we had said about it years ago in that program.

If you just look in a dictionary, you'll find that didactic is defined as something intended to teach. It is often concerned with having moral instruction as an ulterior motive. For example, a didactic novel could be one that tries to expose social injustice.

We spoke about didactics as a discipline concerned with the science of teaching and instruction for any given field of study. Didactics is a theory of teaching, and in a wider sense, a theory and practical application of teaching and learning. That also sounds like pedagogy.

Pedagogy is more focused more on the strategies, methods and techniques associated with teaching and instruction. In our study of pedagogy, we spoke about the ability of a teacher to match the theoretical foundations or concepts that we studied with practical methods using them in a classroom. We also wanted teachers to be able to respond and adapt to the learning strategies of their students.

Didactics is teacher-centered. Pedagogy is learner-centered since teaching must be adapted to respond to student needs.

The didactic method of teaching follows a consistent scientific approach or educational style to engage the student’s mind. It is often contrasted (or confused) with dialectics and also with the Socratic method.

Dialectical thinking refers to the ability to view issues from multiple perspectives and then to arrive at the most economical and reasonable reconciliation of these seemingly contradictory things. A dialectic is when two seemingly conflicting things are true at the same time. For example, “It's snowing and it is spring.”

The Socratic method is simplified as "asking questions" but is a three-part method: Give an initial definition or opinion. Ask a question that raises an exception to that definition or opinion. Then, give a better definition or opinion. Teachers and learners employ this method even if they have never been trained to do so. It is a natural way to learn, though it is more effective when done intentionally.

Did I become a proponent of didactic teaching? No. I took it as another tool in the toolbox. I continued to think of pedagogy as the art of teaching and didactics as the science of teaching. I became most interested in andragogy - the method and practice of teaching adult learners. I was teaching graduate students who all adults.

There was so much theory. At that time, open learning, also known as experiential learning, was the new kid on the block and posited that people can learn by themselves, in an unstructured manner, on topics of interest. Learner-centered approaches were much in vogue at that time and didactic learning wasn't very popular with my learning cohorts. They found the focus on outcomes and an overall goal of knowledge with a teacher as an authoritative figure more than as a guide and resource for students to be old-fashioned.

By the time I left my Ed.D program, I had so many theories in my head that the labels fell away and I was following mostly those that overlapped. I thought that some of the basics of andragogy also applied to younger students. I prefer it when learning is self-directed, experiential, utilizes previous and background knowledge, is relevant to current roles and is mostly problem-centered. And one of the principles of adult learning that Malcolm Knowles presented still makes me smile: That students are motivated to learn. That is probably the key principle in any method of learning.

 

Return to the One-Room School

one-room class
I don't know that anyone wants to literally return to the one-room schools of the past. This one is from 1940 in rural Kentucky, USA. But the concept may have present day applications.

According to Wikipedia, one-room schools were once commonplace throughout rural portions of various countries, including Prussia, Norway, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Spain.

In these rural and small town schools (some of which literally used someone's house), all of the students met in a single room. A single teacher taught academic basics to different aged children at different levels of elementary-age boys and girls.

I imagine that younger kids were hearing some of the older kids' lessons and older kids could get some remedial lessons when the younger kids were being taught. I think that could be an interesting model of learning. I also think it would be a challenging teaching assignment. It's a topic I delve into a bit deeper on my other blog.

Any debate about whether to group students by age or ability is hardly a new one. Terms like "performance-based" "ability grouping," "competency-based education" and "age-based instruction" pop up in lots of article, papers and dissertations. Classes and schools have been created around these ideas. And they still are being created - perhaps for different reasons than those that brought the one-room schools of the past into existence.

What is a school without grade levels? I read about a number of contemporary schools, including a district in North Dakota, that felt a drive to teach competencies meant eliminating age-based classrooms.

Back in 2016, I read an article in The Atlantic that asked "What If Schools Abolished Grade Levels?" Their panel concluded that sorting kids by age or ability creates problems.

What are some reasons to consider this approach to education?

In traditional classrooms, the learning is likely to be too fast or too slow for a good percentage of the students.

Rather than using "seat time" (students progressing through school based on the amount of time they sit in a chair), base promotion onward on mastery of competencies and skills.”

Allowing students to learn at their own pace, including progressing more quickly through content they truly understand.

Those sound good. Are there any potential problems with this approach?

Grouping by ability rather than age could increase social interruptions. Having taught middle school and high school, I would tell you that there are some big differences between a sixth grader (typically 11 years old) and an eighth grader (at 13). Even more dramatic would be a class with two very good math students that are 12 and 16 years old. I actually saw that happen several times when middle school students were allowed to go to the high school (or even local college) for advanced classes. I know it works on television for Doogie Howser and Young Sheldon, but maybe not so smoothly in real life. Maturity, socialization and self-esteem are all considerations. 

Scheduling and assigning courses for each student becomes more complicated. 

But even if you question the pedagogy of this approach, what about the andragogy? When we train adult employees or our returning adult undergraduates and graduate students, how do we group? Do we put the 45 year-old woman working on her MBA separate from the 26 year old? Of course, we do not. Through some screening or admission processes, we often put learners in groups based on ability. For example, an employee is brand new to the software so she will go in level one training whether she is 22 or 55 years old.

The old one-room schools were primarily for the lower elementary grade levels, and they very much were products of economics, supply and demand, and necessity. Perhaps, new one-room schools would also work better at those levels rather than at the high school level. We already see some of this arrangement informally or just be accident in higher education and we certainly see it in training situations. This might be the time to reexamine the formal use of ability grouping at different ages and in different situations.