How do you define an Adult Learner?

[Steve Mackenzie]

I purposely do not offer my own view yet!

I am very interested for the purposes of learning when members think adult learning approaches such as Knowles' androgogical approach should be employed?

[Deirdre Bonnycastle]

One of the things we say frequently in our medical college is our students are in the process of becoming adult learners. The most teacher dependant are marks oriented rather than knowing oriented, they actup/actout when in classes they don't like rather than interacting with, they avoid working with others because they believe they have special abilities that the teacher should reward and they rarely reflect on their learning. If we want these students to move to be more adult, then we need to define our learning objectives and reward them intrinsically and extrinsically for that movement. Very behaviorist, which is not my preferred teaching style, but useful for students making the transition who need clarity about where we expect them to change. Our college moved to a pass/fail system, so students would stop depending on marks as their reward and start focusing on achieving occupational goals.

PS. I had the privilege to take a two-week course with Malcolm Knowles in the ‘70’s; he was one of the founding fathers of my teaching philosophy. Montessori was one of the founding mothers just to keep it in balance. Smile. I rarely drop names but it seemed appropriate.

[Steve Mackenzie]

just a test message