|
| Effective Adult Education Programs | With today’s ever-accelerating speed of change in both knowledge and technology, it is clear that adults have an option: they either go on learning all through their lives, or they permit their abilities and knowledge to rapidly glide into obsolescence. The similar standard applies to companies: Those who are unsuccessful to repeatedly teach employees rapidly slide into obsolescence.
Highly effective adult learning needs definite conditions. The question is what are those conditions? Because a small number of studies have examined what kind of learning surroundings best helps adults to develop. Why connect growth with learning? Because significant learning and personal growth are indivisible as growth is learning. The term growth here refers to the adulthood of their thought processes. Just as children develop from simple to complex thinking, adults can go on to grown-up in the way they think. And the way they think have an effect on their character development, moral judgment, interpersonal relationships, impulse control, self-concept, and how well they function in they environment. Yet we have all noticed that not all adults continue to grow, some stop to learn, thus they stop to grow.
The study investigated which features in adult learning surroundings best make easy adult growth and development. Sixty men and women who began doctoral programs between ages 37 and 48 were under investigation. They had two tests evaluating adult development, a survey, and 17 of them were interviewed. All measures described the similar results. It was as though this research snapped many pictures of a hardly visible phenomenon from a variety of approaches, and when developed, all pictures revealed the similar obvious image.
Results revealed that adults can and do experience important personal growth at midlife. Though, adult students grew considerably only in one kind of learning environment, they tended not to grow or to go back in another kind. What was the difference? The seven key things found in learning programs that motivated adult development are the following:
1. The environment where students feel safe and supported, where personal needs and individualities are privileged, where abilities and life achievements are recognized and appreciated.
2. The environment that promotes intellectual freedom, supports experimentation and imagination.
|
|
