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| Effective Adult Learning Programs | 3. The environment where faculty treats adult students as peers accepted and respected as clever experienced adults whose views are listened to, honored, appreciated. Such faculty members frequently remark that they learn as much from their students as the students learn from them.
4. Self-directed education, when students take all the responsibility for their learning. They often work with faculty to plan personal learning programs determining all learning needs and wants of every person in order to function well in their profession.
5. Pacing or intellectual confront. The most positive pacing is demanding people just beyond their current level of capability. If challenged too much, people usually give up. If challenged too little, they turn out to be bored and learn little. Those adults who reported experiencing high levels of intellectual inspiration to the point of feeling discomfort grew more.
6. Active participation in learning, as different to inactively listening to lectures. Where students and instructors interrelate, where students test new ideas in the workplace, where exercises and experiences are used to strengthen facts and theory, adults grow more.
7. Usual feedback mechanisms for students to tell faculty what works best for them and what they would like to learn and faculty who hear and make changes based on student input.
On the contrary, in learning programs where students feel unsafe and in danger, where they are viewed as assistants, life achievements not honored, those students are inclined to regress in development, particularly in self-estimation and self-confidence. In programs where students are required to take the same lockstep courses, whether pertinent to professional goals or not, and where they are frequently expected to spend some years working on a dissertation that is part of a professor's research project instead of on a topic of their choice, they grow less. In other words, students grow more in student-centered as contrasting to faculty-centered programs.
Students often learn fast and effectively in classes where they feel safe, where lessons are focused on their present needs, where they are asked for contribution on what helps those most to learn, where they are vigorously involved in interesting and fun exercises, where there is lots of laughter and friendliness. In classes where students are made to feel insufficient and in danger, little is learned.
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