Training Adult Learners

Over the last year or two I have attended a handful of professional development conferences designed for educators desiring to improve their practice. The most puzzling (and unfortunately repeating) occurrence at these different workshops has been a frustrating lack of attention to how adults learn! How could this be? This is continuing education for educators by educators!


At each of the conferences I attended, I noticed the same phenomenon. It seems that in a desire to begin at the beginning and provide lots of rationale and information, a number of workshop presenters created massive slide decks and fire hosed their audiences with slide after slide of dense text, starting at the very beginning of the topic while simply forgetting that their audience was comprised of experienced educators who had already bought into what they were promoting and were present to get practical how to's and examples from others for how to do the "thing" we had all come to the conference to learn.

The problem wasn't in the session descriptions. They were all beautifully written with outcomes around what we'd walk away being able to do. But the sessions simply didn't deliver. Amazingly, one of the conferences even planned for this failure by building in "last minute" sessions for the last day. These last minute sessions were 1/2 hour make up sessions created in response to the workshop evaluations. When these sessions were posted on the last day schedule I noticed two things. Every single "last minute" session had a title that began with "How to..." or "Examples of..." It was then I realized that others must have written feedback like I was writing.... that they too had come for how to's and examples, and that across the board, most of the sessions had not delivered on their session descriptions! While I appreciate the efforts of the conference organizers to respond to our needs, it is frustrating to try to get in 30 minutes what was originally designed for 90.

So I returned to the question in my own mind, what went wrong and how might it be remedied?

If we go back to what we know about adult learners we are reminded that adult learners submit to education or training because they want to solve a problem in their life (work or personal) or enhance their self-esteem or status. I attended those conferences, much like the others I spoke to or overheard, to learn how to do some new research-based practice that I'd read about and wanted to add to my teaching toolbox. I knew the basics, rationale and theoretical foundation. I was convinced and intentionally selected those conferences that described themselves as HOW TO and EXAMPLES OF conferences. If they'd been delivered as advertised they would have solved my problem of wanting to but not knowing how, and they would have increased my self-efficacy around my ability to implement that practice. In other words they would have been bang on in meeting my needs as an adult learner to solve a problem in my life and enhance my self-esteem.

The second thing we know about adult learners is that they bring a great deal of wisdom and expertise to training and continuing education. There was a wealth of knowledge in those conference sessions among the participants but instead of planning activities in which we could share what we do and how we do it, we spent time doing activities aimed at convincing us we should care about the topic.

So, as I spend this week preparing two workshops for colleagues who are experienced educators, I am exceedingly mindful of the fact that I owe them something of value. They are taking time out of their busy schedules and they are talented and seasoned educators. My task has three parts. This first is to create workshop activities that invite them to share with each other in a planful way that intentionally advances them towards the workshop outcome. The second is to give them how-to steps for the process they are coming to learn. The third is to provide lots of real-life, real-classroom examples of the process in action. If I do those three things, hopefully no one will need a "last minute session" on the final day of our conference.