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(Unit 6) Topic 9: Exploring Adult Learning

3 Clock Hours of Early Childhood Education

The Pros of Teaching Adults

Topic 9 Page 4

If you read through some of the comments on the previous page, you may have seen that you are not alone in your experiences teaching adult learners.

Training adults is tricky and we all have experiences that we would rather forget. Everything in life has pros and cons. Eating chocolate cake for dessert is delicious but it may mean that you go to bed with heartburn. You take the good with the bad in most situations and weigh the possibilities. Teaching adults is different than teaching children in this respect as well.

Seeing the light in a little one’s eyes when they realize that blue and red make purple usually sticks with teachers much more than the temper tantrum over the dress up area being too full. We latch on to the good and it almost always triumphs over the bad. Teaching adults tends to be the opposite. Working with a group of people your own age and in the same field can be daunting and we usually fixate on the negative experiences and struggle to let them go.

There is no need to be afraid or unsure of teaching adults. Though we often over criticize ourselves which results in a focus on what went wrong, there is a great deal of good going on if you know where to find it.