Daydreaming during a well-built lesson plan, doodling into your notes, being saved by the sound of a bell that offered a moment of freedom. As a kid, the classroom was the last place you wanted to be found and unfortunately you didn’t have much of a choice. Once you graduated, the feeling of having to sit through long complicated classes were over as you believed you would never have to sit through another class again. However, as an adult, and you will learn this quick if you haven’t yet, learning goes beyond the classroom and continues to present new challenges as you get older. In fact, learning as an adult is full of newer, bigger, and bolder challenges. If you plan on instructing a class of adults, you’ll need to know three important steps to doing so.
Learning seemed like your only job in this world as a kid. You were required to go to school, sit through classes, and take tests on different subjects. As an adult your job is your actual job, not to mention, bills, kids, family, and every other curve-ball and hurdle adult life has to offer. As the giant to-do list of adult life grows, it’s easy to say that the biggest challenge to adult learning is motivation. As a child you had no choice but to do as you were told and go to school, as an adult you could quite literally have Doritos for breakfast while doing nothing and no one could tell you no. According to an article on alabamapathways.org, “The best way to motivate adult learners is to simply enhance for enrolling and decrease barriers where possible.” These barriers are the responsibilities of adulthood. For example, timing, money, and family can leave little to no room for energy and motivation to learn. To get an adult motivated they must know the “why” which remind themselves of the reward of learning at expense of their finite energy.
Once you’ve explained the “why” the next step is to create engaging content to keep the adult’s attention and allows them to retain information. In school, you were forced to complete the learning guides and do long complicated assignments however telling an adult to do the same just won’t work anymore. To keep an adult’s attention, you’ll need to create content that specifically speaks to the learner’s individual needs if you want them to retain information. A great way to build your adult training content is to use the Addie Model. The Addie Model is a 5-step approach to building effective training content and is a useful tool most instructors use to improve adult the learning experience.
These 5 steps include:
Analyze the instructional goals and resources.
Design a learning solution the aligns objectives and strategies with instructional goals.
Develop learning resources, validate and revise drafts, and conduct a pilot a test.
Implement the learning solution by preparing the learning space and engaging participants.
Evaluate the quality of learning resources and how well they accomplish instructional goals.
From listing instructional goals to making evaluations, the 5-step Addie Model can be considered as the building blocks to content creation for instructors.
The final step is something most adults lose as they get older and that is confidence. In fact, Learnkit.com lists the 5 Ways Adults Learn Differently Than Children and number 5 on this list claims that adults are afraid to fail. The article states that “Children don’t have the same social filters and are more willing to experiment. Adult learning needs to be scaffolded (built on in small pieces and supported with extra learning) or they risk losing their intrinsic motivation and focus.” Adults just have more to lose and the idea of failure seems a lot more intense than it did as a child. Most adults have already lived through the worst parts of school which could include bad report cards and failing important tests without having major consequences. Now as an adult the weight of failure is heavy and can cause fear and doubt in an individual’s desire to obtain new information. If you plan on keeping your class of adult learners motivated, you will need to give continuous reassurance to enforce the “why” they chose to learn the information in the first place.
Motivation, creative content, and confidence are the three steps to a successful learning experience. Adults do not learn like children and will need to be approached differently or the learning facilitation will likely fall apart. It’s not easy instructing adults because there are more challenges and barriers to overcome but with good training and determination, anything can be learned.