If I know something about my students, I can provide better feedback. For example, I teach project management, if I know a student is younger with little work experience, I will know their answers will be based more on course content than personal experience. I can provide feedback highlighting life experiences that could be used. Instead of insisting on a work experience I can suggest that they use a personal experience such as working on a church project, a school or sports project for one of their children, etc.
All students learn in different ways and a lot of times this relates to their cultural as well as academic background.
Although difficult and time consuming, attempting to understand each learner's characteristics helps re-frame material into varied contexts and generates more class discussion, more questions and more comments and feedback.
By understanding the characteristics of my adult learners, I am able to better prepare my classroom programming to suit their needs and requirements. I like to involve them directly in the lectures, by utilizing a discussion format, to allow them to input their individual experiences.
Hi Christine,
Good comments on how to work with diverse student groups. Your own life experiences and successes reflect how instructors need to approach the classroom. The more we know the more effective we will be in targeting the learning and support needs of our students.
Gary
Hi Donna,
Right you are. It is critical to retention and engagement to know your students as best you can. The more you know the more you have to work with in terms of planning.
Gary
If I know how my students learn the best I can incorporate the different styles and make sure that my subject material reaches all student.
With many students, I feel the instructor needs to "level the playing field" to some degree. Not every student comes into school with the same expectations and many come into class with fears and apprehension. I can identify with this because I just attained my Masters Degree after being out of college for 23 years. It was intimidating to sit in class with younger students but I found the younger students were open to the experiences of older students and my anxiety level decreased dramatically. I think it is extremely important to know and understand each students characteristic because it could become an obstacle to their success. It also tells the student that you are genuinely care about them and their success. This will give them more passion to learn and have more confidence in themselves.
Its important to know who your students are and where they come from
Hi Kevin,
Like your example about swimming because I think that this is very true about learning. I also heard learning as being defined as trying to take a drink from a fire hose. So between drinking from a fire hose and trying to learn to swim students have many opportunities to get the information stored in their minds.
Gary
Hi Christopher,
This is so important as you are starting a new class. The more you know about your students the more information you have to plan your instructional delivery. Good point, thanks for sharing it.
Gary
We as instructors must understand the differnt learning styles and what students need to be succcessful. We need to differentiate all instruction to reach learning styles of all students. I like to think learning is like swimming you cannot learn to swim if you do not first get in the water. As teachers our instrucrtional strategies have to get all students to get in the water.
I try to learn as much about the students (experience, education, culture, and special individual requirements) as possible. This allows me the best opportunity to keep them motivated, assist them in the learning process and to get them to contribute to the lesson
Hi Faylee,
Right you are about diverse classes like this being a challenge. To be able to balance such is a lot of work but the pay off at the end is great. Keep up the effort because you are impacting lives for years to come.
Gary
Hi Donald,
One of the parts of teaching in a career college is that you are helping students to prepare to be successful in their careers. Among the components of career preparation is the understanding of how to cope and meet with deadlines. You are enforcing a policy that helps student to learn this concept even when it seems to be strict. Their employers will be enforcing such policies as well so they need to understand they the whys of deadlines.
Gary
having a diverse class in many characteristics can make control an issue. I have some students that just turned 18 and want to treat class like high school and then older learners who only want to learn and not socilize etc. Balancing this group can me a challenge if you do not recognize the needs of each individual.
Adult learners seem to want the rules to bend due to family situations. Those with small children, especially if sick, just flat tell me that they will be late with the work and that they would like to be given more time for assignments. I began my adult teaching career trying to understand and say yes quite often. That technique got me more students with needs. Now, I explain the reasons for deadlines up front and I enforce them. I have not found that the students like me any less, and the work load is more even for me because I get fewer late papers.
Hi Ross,
Good way to customize and personalize your instruction to meet the needs of your students. These efforts will help to keep the students engaged and focused on the course content.
Gary
Hi Travis,
Good strategy. Students like to be able to bring their life experiences into the classroom. You are enabling them to contribute while keeping the class moving forward.
Gary
It helps me to develope methods and techniques to deliver the course material and what approach I should take in addre3ssing the needs of the students. I try to determine the best approach to reach the needs of each student so they can learn and retain the material.
