Unit 6 Activity 1: Adult Learners
Last year, I taught continuing education with the Coquitlam School District. I taught Foundations of Mathematics 11 twice a week in the evenings to adult learners looking to upgrade or gain credits for graduation. The demographics of the students ranged from newly graduated high school students looking to upgrade their marks for university applications to more mature, newly-immigrated adults working towards completing a dogwood diploma or an adult graduation diploma. While challenging at times because of the wide range of backgrounds and skills of the students, it was also one of the most rewarding experiences of my career so far. I would like to share my experience by framing it around Malcolm Knowles’ (as cited in Trinity Western University, 2017) six principles of Andragogy.
- As a person matures, his or her self-concept moves from that of a dependent personality toward one of a self-directing human being.
One of the biggest learning differences I noticed in my evening class of adult learners compared to my morning class of teenage students was the adult learners’ abilities to work through difficult math problems on their own. In my morning class of teenage students, I needed to do a lot of scaffolded learning in order to guide the students to solve the problems otherwise many of them would give up on the question altogether. However, in the evening class, the adult learners showed a lot more perseverance and grit. They would often work through difficult problems without needing and requesting guidance at every step. - An adult accumulates a growing reservoir of experience, which is a rich resource for learning.
Foundation of Mathematics 11 deals with many real life applications such as income taxes and probability. This often led to many meaningful conversations about life in general because all the students came from different backgrounds and had different experiences. One conversation I really enjoyed was when we discussed the addictive qualities of gambling during our unit on probability. Adult learners bring a much broader spectrum of opinions and ideas because of the experiences they have had in life. - The readiness of an adult to learn is closely related to the developmental tasks of his or her social role.
As I mentioned earlier, many of the adult students were new immigrants who were working towards either an adult graduation or a dogwood diploma. A large number of these students felt that achieving a diploma was an integral part of becoming integrated into Canadian society and culture. These students often worked much harder than others whose goals were to take the course to upgrade a mark for college or university applications. - There is a change in time perspective as people mature – from future application of knowledge to immediacy of application. Thus, an adult is more problem than subject centered in learning.
While the main focus of the course was still covering the learning outcomes of the course, we often veered off into discussions that were off-topic. Because I immigrated to Canada as a young child with my family, many of the newly-immigrated students were much more interested in my background than in the mathematics. They were much more interested in learning about my experience assimilating into the culture here than they were about the actual math. I enjoyed our conversations very much because it really helped me build a strong connection with the students. - Adults are mostly driven by internal motivation, rather than external motivators.
In my day classes with teenage students, most of them were driven to perform by grades. I found that many students were more concerned with their marks than with the actual learning of mathematics. However, in my evening classes, the adult students were much more focused on the actual learning of the mathematics and understanding the concepts. While grades and marks were still important to them, there was a much larger focus on actually understanding the material rather than just how to achieve a good grade. I believe that this was because many of the adult learners were internally motivated to learn rather than just externally motivated by grades. - Adults need to know the reason for learning something.
This was the hardest part about teaching math to adult learners. In a class of teenage students, they rarely asked why something was taught. However, with adult learners, they often asked why something was taught and whether it was really relevant. In the case of upper level secondary mathematics, sometimes there was no “real-life” relevance. For example, there is really very little reason for most people to learn about standard deviations and variances. However, adult learners are also extremely understanding with the answer “because it is in the curriculum”. They understood that while some of the concepts were not directly applicable to their lives, it was part of the course and that was enough of a reason to learn the concept.
My favourite part about working with adult learners was the connections and relationships I built with them. Even though I was the teacher there to deliver the math lessons, I found that I learned so much myself just from learning about their backgrounds and skills. I hope that in the future, I will have the opportunity to work with adult learners again.
References
Trinity Western University. (2017). Unit 6 Notes. Retrieved from https://create.twu.ca/ldrs500/unit-6/unit-6-notes/