There’s a scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in which the economics teacher, played by Ben Stein, stands in front of a room of apparently comatose students. “Anyone? Anyone?”
John Hughes’ classic film caricatures a familiar model of education: the teacher has the knowledge; the learners are there, probably reluctantly, to receive it. The best adult learning is different.
The term andragogy distinguishes adult learning from traditional pedagogy. Our practical shift is from seeing learners as passive recipients towards people taking increasing responsibility for their own development.
The learner moves:
- from dependent to increasingly self-directed
- from receiving answers to testing possibilities
- from studying a subject to improving performance
Which changes the trainer’s job from asking, “What do I need to tell them?”, to the more useful design question of “What do they need to do?”
Activities are at the heart of it, because they turn concepts into skills and actions.
A good learning activity gives participants:
- something to achieve
- choices with consequences
- rapid feedback
- permission to experiment
This creates a temporary world in which to try something, notice what happens and have another go.
In their enthusiasm, trainers sometimes find an attractive activity which misses a critical element – the game has to contain the learning.
If the aim is listening, the structure should make listening necessary. If the aim is collaboration, participants must rely on each other. If judgement matters, offer meaningful choices rather than merely reward speed.
At PJA we use games, simulations and improvisation because they allow people to practise skills in a compressed and visible form.
The facilitator helps make explicit the connection between what happened in the room and what happens at work.
The learning is already present in the experience. Our job is to help people notice it, make sense of it and use it.