Adult Learners
Engaging adult learners with the CCS
It is the responsibility of the adult educator to ensure that their learners are ready to learn. You must create the need to know.
Perhaps the most important step in adult learning is ensuring that participants are fully engaged and ready to learn. The learner must feel that what they are about to be presented with is relevant, required and beneficial. This is not always easy to achieve in workplace education programs.
Why?
Much of the content in workplace education programs is already generally known to the learners. They know what to do but they often don't do what they know. Or at least they don't do it as well as their own ideals would dictate. This is particularly true for areas such as: customer service, leadership, management, sales, communication and stewardship. In all such cases it is imperative that adult learners be brought to the point where they are ready to consider and take on new content and behaviours before presenting this information is presented.
How does the CCS help?
The CCS provides an easy, reliable way to get adult learners ready to learn by:
- providing a way to uncover, talk about and understand their ideals on a subject and compare it with their common practice.
- making it easy for learners to see that there are other views.
- creating a positive tension in the adult learner that pushes them to want to 'test' their understanding against new and other ideas - it creates the need to know.
Show me
Creating the need to know in a leadership education program:
In this example the participants are taking part in a leadership training program. Most participants in such a program will have experience and opinions about the characteristics of good leadership and may not be ready to learn or unlearn. As such it is preferable to begin such a program by first creating the need to know in the minds of each participant – the need to know that their understanding and current practices are: valid, appropriate, supported by evidence, common, unique, should be improved, and so on. This helps create enrolment from even the most qualified participants and provides an excellent way for a group to learn from itself.
Having already introduced the CCS cards to the participants the facilitator leads them through a CCS visualisation topic:
"Place your cards on the table in front of you and close your eyes. Now, think of a time, an experience, when you were being led by someone you believe was an excellent, perhaps even, 'ideal' leader. It could have been at work, at school, as a member of club or interest group, a sporting team, a band, whatever – just think of a specific incident. Think about how you felt in that leadership situation. What was good about the experience? What are you doing during the experience? What language was used and when? How did others behave? What were the outcomes from this excellent leadership experience?"
[be silent for a few moments] Now, open your eyes.
Go through your vision pack and find 5 cards that for you describe the elements of that excellent leadership experience. The elements that led you to call it excellent leadership. It's not so much the story of the experience that is important – it's what were the elements of that excellent leadership experience?
Once the cards have been chosen everyone is asked to reveal their choices and to share their thoughts with the person next to them.
Remember, sometimes people do not truly know what they think until they hear what they say – so it is good practice to give them the chance to articulate their choices before sharing with the whole group or acting upon their response.
The facilitator then highlights some common responses and one or two unique choices from around the group.
The group is now ready and keen to listen to new content.