Conversation

It's funny how adults learn.  I'm teaching literacy on a volunteer basis two evenings a week.  Being a structured kind of guy, I prepare a lesson plan for each session (the process takes me an hour or so at the moment), and struggle manfully to follow it in our two hour sessions.  The "manfully" part is a clue--the class consists of five women.  Staying ahead of the group and trying to steer is a challenge, we tend to get distracted.  

That's OK, however, instructor-led learning is not the real model here.  Adults learn more readily when they are in charge of the direction you take.  Learner-centered is the model.  When we were being trained as tutors, the model was very democratic, with the students steering the course.  But that does not take into account the tendency that most of us have in an unfamiliar situation to leave speaking up to the other people in the room.  If I ask the students in the class what they would like to do next, their eyes are downcast, and nobody steps forward and makes a suggestion.  It's asking a little much of a new student to direct the process.  I have been using the structure of the course to show a regular pattern, and I ask at the end of each session if what we are doing has value.  My sense was that sooner or later they would begin to point in which direction they want to go.  

One of the things we do to start each session is to talk a bit about whatever comes to mind, getting to know each other a little better and practicing speaking English.  I don't need the practice, but I do it anyway (that was a joke).  One thing I find myself doing is a lot of self-disclosure.  My sense is that it should make them more comfortable in the setting.  Consequently, they already know more about me than some people I have known for several years.  

The only down side to this talking habit is that we get side tracked by returning to it during the rest of our session.  Someone will bring a topic back up and we'll spend time talking more about it, even if I can't deduce how we got back on the subject.  When I was in college, one of my classmates specialized in asking multiple questions to slow down the instructor and, thus limit the amount of material the instructor could cover before the next exam.  No such motivation for this group, but it does keep you from following the old lesson plan.  

As we were talking last night, I mentioned something one of the learners had said and offered a suggestion on a better way to say it.  Five minutes later, two of the participants mentioned they had a habit of doing the same thing, so my suggestion had been very helpful.  I had been worried that I had singled out one of them for a mistake, and that this might lead to some embarrassment, etc.  Instead, they pointed out this was one of the most helpful parts of the sessions.  So it turns out that, more important than a lesson plan, a little conversation makes all the difference.  I'm going to have to get better at it.