Active Learning, Diversity, 1

Adult Education Teaching Styles

Teaching styles can be described with many different terms: authoritarian, demonstrator, delegator, and facilitator. The authoritarian style dominated the old Medieval style university, where lectures climaxed in a test or a final paper, the students passive recipients of wisdom. The demonstrator works best when the students have hands-on material to learn, such as web design. The delegator transfers responsibility to individuals and groups, allowing them to help decide how the course will be taken. The facilitator emphasizes active learning, with many activities designed to engage the student in educational growth (Shaw Corporation, 2005).

Facilitator
When I am teaching computer science at Glendale Community College, I emphasize activities rather than passive listening, which is especially deadly with an unmotivated class taking a required course. Instead of using the PowerPoint slides, beautifully designed to go with the text, I engage the class in a Socratic dialogue about computer use, from the home computer to the marketplace (airline tickets, checking out at Wal-Mart), to the job market. The most fun a class had took place when I taught them web design with Word and gave the class freedom to create their own personal websites (college appropriate). They had to learn the basics of the Web, follow directions in saving the right files to the right web folder, and link their computer science homework within the web pages.
A facilitator assumes that the class genuinely wants to learn, in spite of contrary evidence. In fact, no group of adults, young or old, will appreciate sitting and listening for long periods. Their best use of time and talent involves actively learning. The more practical the course, the more they need to work the keyboard rather than listen to theories and definitions. This method is especially important since computer science ages so quickly. The students need to extirpate their fears with trial and error, not learn the terminology of Windows 3.1. I was tested on Windows 3.1 when I passed the A+ test but I have never worked with that ancient operating system.