Hi Michelle,
Thank you for this great example of how a person can reinvent himself. He decided that he needed a change and took the steps to make that change. I am sure he was a motivating factor for your current students. It is true you can change the course of your career if you are willing to put forth the effort to make the change. It is not easy but it is possible. Many of us come from situations like his that enabled us to be in a career area we love because we decided with the help of our support group to make and change and we did.
Gary
The adult learners needs are the foundation of their intrensic motivation. If I can make my class content relevent to the students needs I will have helped the students and myself. Strategies I want to become more comfortable with are review and role playing.
Students come to career colleges to prepare for a career. They expect to come get the training they will need and leave prepared to start working right away. I always like to tell them stories based on lectures so they can see how the lecture is important and relevant. They need to see I am not wasting their time but the information received is important for their career. Now all I have to say is "I have a story" and my students get all excited. They love hearing these stories and I know that they won't forget the material because they will remember the story behind it.
Hi Rebecca,
You are going to get some very good return on your use of role playing. If you set it up right the students really get into it and sometimes it is hard to get them to step out of their roles. Also, you can use role playing as a method of review so you will be touching upon both of your instructional delivery goals when you implement role playing. I wish you the best with this addition to your instructional efforts.
Gary
I've found that with adult learners, they have strong motivation. It takes a lot of motivation to return to school and if I "play" to a student's motiviation, they "buy" into the class a lot more. One way I try to identify expectations is that on the first day of the class, I have the students fill out a notecard for me. They answer three questions,
1. "What made you decide to return to nursing school?"
2. "How do you learn best: visual, audio, demo or mixed?"
3. "What is your greatest expectation of me as an instructor?"
Reviewing these cards help me tailor my methods to each class. The only difficulty I have, is that sometimes students reply with unrealsitic expectations,ie-"I expect to get an A." However, I have found that many times, the students respond approiately and candidaly.
I teach an American history course as a requirement for different groups of students, including social work students, in a small college. While the other students don't seem to have problem taking this class, most of the social work students always ask the question of why they have to take it. After a few semesters teaching the course, I realized that I had to explain to the students why they needed to take this American history. Particularly, for the social work students, I told them that this American history will help them understand how the different social policies and welfare systems were created. This explanation, which demonstrated the relevance of the course, actually encouraged them to take it seriously.
Hi Adrien,
Good way to make your course have application and relevancy. Sometimes students get so caught up in it being a requirement and they forget it has value. I teach a required course and I have to make sure they understand that it is a requirement for a reason and I have to make that reason very clear to them.
Gary
Adult students don;'t like busy work. They want assignments to be meaningful. All of our courses require at least one written assignment. When I first began teaching this particular course that I have now been teaching for a number of years the written assignment was for a student to do a report on any type of bread. To me this was simply busy work. While a student could get some value from such an assignment, many students blew off the assignment. Frankly, I couldn't blame them, as the assignment did little for their career preparation. I decided to change the assignment to make it more meaningful. Since many of my students indicate an interest in becoming owners of a bakery, I have them visit a bakery and do a report on it. I give them a specific list of things to look for, and tell them to look at the bakery with a critical eye. Did they like the bakery or not? Why? What did the bakery do good? What can the bakery improve on? Did it meet your standards as to what a good bakery should be? This assignment makes them apply standards learned in class to a real bakery and them determine if the bakery is meeting the test.
Hi Michael,
This is a great example of making an assignment real. You took a graphic example and gave it relevancy to their learning. This is what being an educator is all about. Thank you for sharing this strategy with us.
Gary
I let my students know how each lesson will help them with the next lesson and will eventually make their jobs easier.
My students have a very vague idea about the profession of repiratory therapy. They are usually expecting an easy to learn profession.
As the instructor for their Intro to Respiratory Therapy class, my students will realize that the profession involves in-depth study into Anatomy, Physiology, Physics, etc. I try to make it relevant to them by sharing my experience in the field. I also share the consequences of not knowing basic concepts of respiratory therapy and how it can drastically impact their patients' lives.
I work in the culinary industry and students think that is not necessary to know baking and pastry.I explain to them that is good to know as much as they can in this industry because you never know when you go to use it.
Adult learners normally have the need to learn something relevant to achieving their career goals. This would be the relevant information that they will be looking for in the classroom/lab. Some of the ways that I make my instructional content and delivery relevant is by having an organized room, applying my past career experiences to the daily lessons, and having the students physically do the things that they are eventually going to do in the industry. This includes being in uniform, being prompt, and complying to standard operating procedures. Although the students come with some realistic expectations, I think that it is up to me to give them some of the real world expectations that aren’t so glamorous.
Since I teach at a culinary school, all of our students are very clear about what they are there to learn. Of course, some are more motivated than others; while we have many adult learners who are either changing careers or pursuing a long-held dream, we also have a large population of recent high-school graduates who are not so clear about what they want or why they are there. Perhaps we cannot yet consider them "adult learners." At any rate, those students who are clear have very concrete expectations which, If I pay attention to them, could help crisply delineate the exact nature of the course content that they are interested in. Of course, unfortunately, our curriculua are largely proscribed, so i do not have the luxury or even authority to tailor my class content to a given class's whims.
I usually express relevency of the subject matter with case studies or past personal experiences. I will do this in the form of a question based on real life or put the student in the place of someone in the situation. I may also have two or three students take different parts in a role play situation to see the revelence from different angles.
Hi Bruno,
This is a good way to help your students to see both application and relevancy to all that they are learning, not just the specific area of culinary arts they are interested in. Many of us have our current positions because we had knowledge and skills we could use to get our jobs and then grow in them, but if we hadn't had the basics we would not have gotten our feet in the door.
Gary
When students come to cooking school, they have some idea of what they want to cook. We bring the industry into the classroom and mold the students expectations to the industry standards. At that point, the students start getting creative. They often try to build on what they have been taught about classical cuisine.
Since my students are MBA level, it is easy to relate course materials to actual applications in a business organization. Such as , how is a budget useful.
At the Le Cordon Bleu almost everything we do is hands on and relevant to the students. I may demo a sauce in class that they can utilize immediately in the industry...I believe this really helps us build a strong foundation. More emphasis can be placed on why techniques can be used in the industry, but other than that I feel we are doing a good job!
Adult Learners expectations can be met in class by providing them different learning tools such as. Reviews with Powerpoints, Outlines before a test or for use in Lecture. This allows each student and a particular learning need to be addressed in class.
