How to Teach Adults

Plan Your Class, Teach Your Students, Change the World, Expanded Edition

Dan Spalding

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118841280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Formation pour adultes

Your hands-on guide to teaching adults... no matter what the subject

In this expanded edition of How to Teach Adults, Dan Spalding offers practical teaching and classroom management suggestions that are designed for anyone who works with adult learners, particularly new faculty, adjuncts, those in community colleges, ESL teachers, and graduate students. This reader-friendly resource covers all phases of the teaching process from planning what to teach, to managing a classroom, to growing as a professional in the field.

How to Teach Adults can guide new instructors who are trying to get up to speed on their own or can help teacher trainers cover what their students need to know before they get in front of a class. It is filled with down-to-earth tips and checklists on such topics as connecting with adult students, facilitating discussions, and writing tests, plus everything you need to remember to put into your syllabus and how to choose the right textbook. Dan Spalding reveals what it takes to teach all students the skills they need to learn, no matter what the topic or subject matter.

Full of vivid examples from real-world classrooms, this edition:

• Shows how to get started and tips for designing your course
• Includes information for creating a solid lesson plan
• Gives suggestions for developing your teacher persona

How to Teach Adults offers the framework, ideas, and tools needed to conduct your class or workshop with confidence.

CHAPTER 1
Foundations of Teaching

Safety First, Discomfort Second

Students can't learn when they're comfortable.

We humans instinctively stay in our comfort zone—a literal and metaphorical space where everything is familiar and easy.¹ When it comes to learning, students' comfort zone is receiving the information they're used to in the formats they're used to, engaging it how they're used to at the pace that they're used to.

It's hard to get yourself out of your own comfort zone. That's one reason people take classes—to get information they're not used to (new facts, new perspectives), in formats they're not used to (lectures, academic writing), engaging it in new ways (group activities, portfolio projects) at a faster (or more deliberate) pace. Whether they know it or not, students come to you because they've hit the limit of what they can learn in their comfort zone.

This leads me to conclude that, in order to maximize student learning, teachers must make students uncomfortable. Your job is to create a thoughtful, supportive environment that invites (or forces) students to attempt new challenges and learn from them. Reward risk taking, even if students are not immediately successful, because those risks help students get out of their comfort zone and break through old boundaries.

Get students into the discomfort zone as much as possible. That's where learning lives. (For tips on teaching this concept on the first day of class, see Chapter 4, “Teach the discomfort zone.”)

What you should not do is push students into their alarm zone. This is where students feel unsafe and shut down. Watch out for when students grow silent or get angry. Even if they're not visibly distraught, they may be in their alarm zone. Forcing a student to do a presentation in front of the class, which he stammers through, red-faced, before rushing out the door, is an example of a student likely pushed into their alarm zone. (See Figure 1.1.)

Figure 1.1 The discomfort zone
Source: Adapted with permission from Training for Change, 2012.

When you see students get into their alarm zone, immediately change or end what you're doing. Transition to an activity they're familiar with, especially a solo reflection process like journal writing. You can use this as an opportunity for students to think about what they got out of the activity or to debrief what was so difficult about it.

On the other hand, don't panic if students occasionally get irritated or frustrated. An emotional response is the best indication that students are in their discomfort zone. The better you get to know your students, the easier it will be to distinguish discomfort from alarm.

When students succeed in their discomfort zone, they expand their comfort zone forever. The same goes for teachers, too.

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Hint: Some students are in their discomfort zone just by coming to class. If so, build trust to get them into their comfort zone before pushing them out of it again. (See Chapter 6, “Build trust to maximize learning.”)

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Being an Expert Doesn't Make You a Good Teacher

Struggling with a subject helps you teach it.

Just being good at something doesn't qualify you to teach it. A Super Bowl–winning quarterback may actually have more trouble coaching a high school football team than someone who never made it to the NFL. How can you understand your players' primitive mistakes when you've spent your whole life playing at the highest levels of the game?

Instructors who have struggled with what they teach may start out more insecure, but their struggle will make them better teachers. Take ESL teachers who aren't native English speakers. Without exception, they are better able to explain the rules of grammar because they had to painstakingly learn them all, instead of unconsciously acquiring English grammar as children. Many English language learners are more inspired by nonnative-speaker teachers than they are by some sucker who just knows English by dint of being born in the United States.

If you're reading this book because you want to teach something you weren't naturally good at, be reassured. On the other hand, if you want to teach something at which you are gifted, know that, in some ways, your struggle is just beginning.

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Note: Struggling with your field of study also deepens your compassion for your students.

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Try to See from the Student's Perspective

Understand how students don't understand.

My first assumption about teaching was that it meant transmitting information to students. I was an expert in the English language and my job was to upload that expertise to my class. It was a while before I could articulate how that wasn't the case. I gradually realized that my job was to maximize learning, which is what goes on within the student. My focus switched from pouring information out of myself to creating situations that facilitated students building their own knowledge.

In order to maximize learning, you must be able to see from the student's perspective. Your job is to understand every one of your students so that you can create activities that maximize each student's ability to learn what you have to teach.

The best use of my own English language expertise wasn't to simply explain vocabulary and grammar. I needed to gauge students' ability at any given task, anticipate mistakes they were likely to make, and create activities to maximize their ability to learn new material. For example, if I was teaching the word “too,” it wasn't enough to explain the textbook definition of “an excess of, used before quantity words like ‘much’ or ‘many.’” I needed to know that students often use “too” interchangeably with “so,” which explains why a Muslim student once told me, “There are too many Muslims in America!”

The ability to imagine is one of your most important teaching skills. You must imagine how students will engage your activities, your assignments, and your subject as a whole. When students make mistakes, don't just correct them. Examine those mistakes to figure out how your students think about what you teach. In so doing, you will improve your understanding of each student's perspective, which will do wonders for your teaching.

Go beyond academics and imagine the entire student experience. Students have to negotiate their classes, the school bureaucracy, their interactions with other students, as well as their work and family lives. It puts your latest homework assignment in perspective.

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Note: The “student's” perspective in the title isn't a typo. My intention is to try to see things the way each individual student does, and to tailor my class to each student's needs.

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Find Out Where Students are on their Journeys

Models of adult development can help you understand your students.

We're supposed to see our students as individuals. Each has goals and challenges unique to that student alone. At the same time, there is a lifelong journey common to us all. Seeing where each student is on that journey helps us understand where to help him or her go next.

Laurent Daloz introduced me to several powerful theories of adult learner development in his classic book Mentor. The one I found most compelling was created by William Perry, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

After analyzing data collected on fifteen years of Harvard undergraduates, Perry theorized a linear path of adult learner development. It begins with freshmen college students expecting professors to simply pour knowledge into them. At this stage only a higher authority can tell the students what the truth is, and distinguish for them right from wrong. Lesser authorities—such as books, other students, or the students' own insights—offer nothing of value.

A year or two later, after exposure to many contradictory facts and perspectives—and after changing their own convictions a few times—these students refuse to take sides on any issue. Why bother when they (or the experts) will inevitably change their mind? “What's the right answer?” is replaced by “It's all relative, man.”

Senior year brings a final change. After countless lectures exploring various theories; classroom (and late-night) discussions showing how reasonable people can draw different conclu­sions from the same information;...