ADULT LEARNING

Adult Learning: What I Discovered



Adult Learning: What I Discovered

Introduction

Whilst learning and studying are personal and individual activities, the judgment and approaches taken by other students can be helpful in the learning process. Remember, you are learning to shape your own expectations of your performance. The ability to be self-critical against a professional standard is the key to success on most courses and in work situations. Other people's expectations and views, together with subsequent feedback from performance, are crucial aids to learning. Whether we like it or not, the world is rapidly advancing into a new era (Cottrell 2003). In this paper, I reflect upon my experience of adult learning. Specifically, I will assess to what extent I have become successful in achieving my objectives as a facilitator of adult learners.

Discussion

Teachers collect information about students' understanding almost continuously and make adjustments to their teaching on the basis of their interpretation of that information. A teacher's formal and informal evaluations of student work should exemplify scientific practice in making judgments. The standards for judging the significance, soundness, and creativity of work in professional scientific work are complex, but they are not arbitrary (Wainryb 1992 45). In the work of classroom learning and investigation, teachers represent the standards of practice of the scientific community. When teachers treat students as serious learners and serve as coaches rather than judges, students come to understand and apply standards of good scientific practice. There is a need for research in the United Kingdom to examine more closely the links between effectiveness at the university level and the ways in which it can promote and support effective teaching within individual classrooms, particularly since the impact of classroom level effectiveness has been shown to influence practice more directly than institutional effectiveness (Nunan 1989 13). This report focuses on how classroom practices such as interaction and language learning can improve the academic outcomes of students and improve professional practices of teachers.

The three 'outcomes' that teachers consider while deciding on the level of interaction are: the learners' receptivity, their practice opportunities, and the input. These outcomes refer to what actually happens in the classroom, regardless of whatever was planned to happen (Doyle 1986 392). For this reason we can expect them to relate closely to the actual learning that we hope also happens, more closely than the relatively remote concepts of the planned classroom atmosphere, method, or syllabus — concepts we have come traditionally to regard as central to our success or failure as teachers. There is often a dynamic interaction among these three aspects of language lessons and the various outcomes which may result. It is likely that every language teacher has had the experience of having something unexpected occur during a lesson. (Nunan 1989 18) Whether it leads to a derailment of the lesson or a contribution to learning is often largely a matter of how the teacher reacts to the unexpected, and the extent to which the co-production is encouraged or stifled (Weinstein et al ...