Creating Courses for Adults

Design for Learning

Ralf St. Clair

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118747056
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

Become an effective adult educator by approaching teaching systematically

As the author describes at the beginning of Creating Courses for Adults, "The big idea of this book is that education for adults has to be designed." Whether in basic skills training, English language classes, professional development workshops, personal interest courses, or formal degree programs, good teaching tends to conceal all the planning and decisions which had to be made in order to present participants with a seamless and coherent process for learning. The author posits that nobody is a completely intuitive teacher and that everybody has to make a series of choices as they put courses together. The decisions they make are important and far-reaching, and deserve to be considered carefully.

Starting with the three core factors which must be taken into account when creating courses, Creating Courses for Adults walks readers through a manageable process for addressing the key decisions which must be made in order to design effective learning.

• Instructor factors are what the teacher brings to the teaching and learning process, such as experience and preferences.
• Learner factors are the influences that students bring with them, including their past experiences and expectations for the class.
• Context factors include the educational setting, whether in-person or online, as well as the subject matter.

Readers of Creating Courses for Adults will learn a systematic approach to lesson and course design based on research into the ways adults learn and the best ways to reach them, along with pointers and tips for teaching adults in any setting.

Part One
Core Factors in Teaching

Chapter One
All About You

It has always seemed right to me to think of teaching as a craft. For any craft, one of the most important aspects is having the right tools and knowing how to use them to their best advantage. As a simple example, having high-quality masking tape makes it far easier to paint a house, but you need to know that it must be removed before the paint is completely dry if you don't want to leave marks (and bits of tape stuck to your walls). One of the differences between teaching and other crafts is that the main tools are the educators themselves. When you are teaching, your personality, your approach, and your values influence the form and outcomes of the process. This is such an important aspect of teaching that it makes a huge difference to be aware of who you are as a teacher and how those strengths may play out in the classroom.

This chapter lays out the importance of the educator's experience and philosophy in shaping the educational process, and leads readers through some options for knowing more about who they are as educators.

By the end of this chapter you will

• Understand the importance of who you are to the way you teach
• Know why reflection on your practice matters
• Have some ideas about how to use your experience

Why Who You Are and What You've Done Matters

When somebody walks into a room to start instruction, he brings his history with him. On the factory floor, the senior employee asked to train new employees has received training in the past and also has experience of working in the factory. The football coach talking to the team is drawing on knowledge and experience of coaching as well as a great deal of time watching games and usually playing as well. The charge nurse orientating new nurses to ward procedures is drawing on work experience, standard procedures, and the way she herself was trained when she arrived. In each case, the educator has a huge range of experiences as well as many hours of formal and informal learning to draw upon.

These background factors can make a big difference to the ways people teach. The overall approach people bring to teaching includes their actions, their beliefs, and their intentions (Pratt, 2002). Actions are observable, and it intuitively makes sense that they demonstrate the approach of the teacher, but beliefs and intentions may not be so obvious. Beliefs, in this context, are the assumptions the individual makes about the purposes and processes of education, and intentions are the outcomes the educator hopes for. Many educators assume that participants learn only from their actions, because these actions represent deliberate communication. Learners do more than this: they learn from the whole context, and that context is shaped by beliefs and intentions. This can be illustrated by thinking about a trades class where the instructor is strongly anti-union. In this case the students learn about installing drywall, but the instructor will choose examples and frame teaching in a way that does not acknowledge the unionized reality of most of the students' working lives. Even if nothing explicit is ever said, the students will pick up on the lack of references and most likely get the message.

One influential factor is the educator's own educational experience. Somebody who did well at school when she was young, tended to be friendly with teachers, and enjoyed reading and writing will have a particular view of teaching and learning. An educator who disliked school, was uncomfortable with the authority of teachers, and hated sitting still at a desk will have a very different perspective. These differing views make a huge difference to the sort of teaching these educators design and deliver, from the objectives through the process to the ways that learning is assessed. We could imagine that the first educator would be quite happy with a student essay as an assessment method, whereas the second would find marking essays excruciating and enjoy something “hands-on” a great deal more.

Ed Taylor (2003) conducted a very interesting study to understand more about the ways in which individuals' experiences in school affected their approach to educating adults. He talked to a number of aspiring adult educators about their experiences as school students and about their approach to being educators themselves. His results were striking, and they underscore the extent to which experience influences educators' practices.

Taylor found that when people are asked to talk about the most positive experiences they have had with teachers and to describe the ideal teacher, the similarities are very strong. So if a person has related well to a teacher who was friendly and supportive, then they describe the ideal teacher as a supportive person. Perhaps more surprising, they also describe themselves as friendly and supportive. The influence of positive experiences with schoolteachers seems to be very strong, even when the educator is thinking about teaching adults in a very different setting.

Previous learning experiences seemed to matter a lot as well, and they shaped how the educators in the study thought about learning. If an educator gained a great deal of insight through project-based learning, then she tended to use projects in her own teaching. It seems that if somebody is involved in an educational experience that suits her and helps her to learn, then she will try to recreate it in her own teaching. With regard to learning, one useful insight is that when asked about positive learning experiences, study participants tended to describe occasions when the teachers made learning engaging and interesting. These educators associated good teaching with effective transmission of existing knowledge rather than a more participatory or ground-up approach.

There are two important lessons from this study. First, teachers have a strong tendency to adopt a teaching style that they would enjoy if they were students, including the sort of techniques and classroom exercises chosen. It is not necessarily a problem that teachers teach as they wish to be taught. In many cases this will be a powerful approach, as the educators will bring insight and enthusiasm to the process. But I do believe that it is important for educators to know that they are doing this and to be aware of the preferences they are bringing to their teaching. For example, I like ideas very much and find them energizing, and this works pretty well with graduate students who love to discuss theory. But I also work with practitioners, who are busy people with a lot on their minds. For them, ideas are often interesting only if they are concretely linked to the complexities of their everyday experience, and it is important to respect this. Knowing my preferences allows me to act thoughtfully and change my approach if another way of working might produce a better outcome for all involved.

The second insight from the study is the way people tend to think of good teachers as good transmitters of information, which reflects only one possible view of the way teaching and learning fit together. In the view of teaching adopted by Taylor's participants, only one side of the equation is considered—that of teaching—and learning is assumed to occur if teaching happens in the right way. Later in this chapter I will be describing other ways of thinking about these factors. Good teaching is not necessarily about transmitting a predetermined set of information in an efficient way—more often than not it is about management of a set of relationships, which may result in efficient transmission but ideally leads to a deeper exchange between the people involved.

The field in which the educator was trained can also be an influential factor (Jarvis-Selinger, Collins, & Pratt, 2007). For example, if you are a trained scientist your teaching might be very orientated toward facts, whereas somebody with a background in literature may want to encourage students to explore ideas and make arguments. Admittedly, this is a bit stereotypical, but it represents the way that different educational experiences can affect the educators' views of the types of knowledge that are most useful. The important thing is being aware of the extent to which your approach as an educator is influenced by this factor and how it is more or less helpful in different situations.

Length of experience in the classroom makes a big difference in teaching—in two different ways. On the positive side, research shows that schoolteachers with experience can be more effective teachers (Murnane & Phillips, 1981). In fact, the difference they discovered was very significant. Children taught by a teacher with five years of experience progressed four to five months more in a single year than those taught by one who was just beginning to teach. On the less positive side, one classic study suggests that over time teachers in schools become less concerned with building rapport with students and more focused on a “tight” process with clear expectations and rules (Rabinowitz & Rosenbaum, 1960). Even though this research looks at schoolteachers, it alerts us to the danger of becoming too rigid in our approach to teaching wherever we work.

These studies suggest that we have to think about our experience in order to ensure that we are making it work for us in positive ways. We need to find ways to hold onto the interest and enthusiasm with which educators start their career of teaching adults, and this chapter will give you tools that will allow you to do this. Before turning to this, though, I need to make one more point. As you go through the questions for reflection and the different philosophies in the next two sections, it is very likely that you will think “Well, it depends,” or “With this group I would do that, with the other group something else,” or “It changes with the aims of the class.” These are absolutely fair reactions—teaching is a dynamic process, and it would be misleading to suggest that any educator approaches it in the same way every time. However, trying to understand your own favored approach can alert you to two aspects of your practice. The first is the starting points you tend to use. What do you take as the default position for teaching, the home base from which you work? The second is the gaps in your practice, the areas where you could potentially do more. Nobody is a perfect educator able to respond in an ideal way to every situation, but being aware of the less developed areas in your practice can be extremely helpful. The next sections look at some ways you can build deeper knowledge of these aspects of your teaching—a necessary step in mastering the tools of your trade.

Reflecting on Your Approach

It is quite useful to educators to understand their own perspective and how it grows out of their experience and any training they may have had. The process of understanding who you are as an educator, and of constantly thinking about how to improve your practice, is called reflection. Somebody who approaches his work in this way is called a reflective educator. This approach has many benefits—not only does it lead to better teaching, but reflective educators often find their work more interesting and challenging.

One person who has thought and written a lot about teaching adults is Stephen Brookfield (1995). He really pays attention to his own teaching practice and why he does the things he does, and he encourages others to do the same. For Brookfield, one of the keys to reflective teaching is identifying assumptions and questioning them.

For some educators, the assumptions that need to be identified might include that adults like to be told what to learn and how to learn it. These educators may believe that adults are busy and don't have time to work this out for themselves. For other educators, the key assumption might be that adults should always be included in course planning, as they are the experts on their own learning. For Brookfield the problem is not that one of these assumptions is wrong and the other right—it's that both represent absolute, unquestioned perspectives on teaching and learning.

Brookfield does not expect educators to adopt a completely open, relativistic approach. What he hopes is that teachers of adults will think about these things and how they play out in their particular teaching context. There are few final answers; really, all we have is a set of well-thought-through responses to a specific situation and set of learners.

On one hand, this is a really high standard to set. The expectation that teachers will genuinely reconsider their most basic beliefs on a continuing basis seems impossible to live up to! On the other hand, the call for an open attitude whereby we really think through what we are doing—and why—sounds like a practical and sensible idea. For many of us, who have a range of tasks other than teaching to deal with, this can be an important and attainable starting point.

The first question is how to begin this process. We get used to our own way of seeing the world, and it becomes transparent to us, like looking through a window. The trick is finding a way to make the glass visible. Sometimes educators get a feeling as they teach that something they are doing is not quite right and could be improved. Sometimes external factors have an influence on how educators think about things. Perhaps most often, educators find themselves thinking about things differently without really knowing why. In any of these situations, reflecting on our work can help us to understand what is happening.

As an example from my own practice, I used to dislike “learning outcomes” or “learning objectives” in my own teaching. They seemed to make education sound mechanical and reduce the opportunities for learners to shape the process and direction of the class. After many years, I started to see that having clear, well-defined objectives could go a long way in helping learners to plan their learning on an informed basis and make it easier for them to know what to expect. They can also provide a way for learners to call instructors to account, in that learning objectives can be seen as a contract between the participants. From this perspective, learning objectives do not limit the power of learners but contribute to that power on a number of levels. My understanding of this complexity came when I stepped back and really thought about something I had noticed—students I worked with often really liked objectives and would ask for them. If they were not available, it could be really stressful for the students and immobilize them. I was struck by the fact that even if the objective was simply to “define the learning objective,” that seemed to be valuable and useful for folk. At this point I began to realize the critical importance of the difference between structure and constraint. Students expect you, as the educator, to (1) help structure what from their experience can seem like a vast field of the unknown, and (2) not limit the ways in which they can cross it. Providing a few...