Teaching Adults In and Out of College

This cluster departs from early childhood education to share with you what I have gathered about educating adults. These provide pathways to alter practice and become a better teacher, which is a lifetime of work.

Best Practices in College Teaching

I have collected and organized specific, visible actions that challenge one to be an effective instructor or professor in higher education. These twelve areas of professional growth provide specifics about what what to learn to do to teach well—not attitudes or generalized aspirations, such as: keep students engaged, design meaningful experiences, provide a road map, give feedback, encourage discussion, and so on. By definition a practice can be demonstrated, regarded, and replicated. A practice is a performance that one can refine over time since it is defined in a way that makes it perceivable at the time it occurs.

Listening to Students

I offer what Dr. Kalyn Shea Owens and I wrote applying documentation to first year general chemistry. This applies Making Learning Visible (Reggio Children and Project Zero) to group learning at the tertiary level. This was the beginning our study, and it illustrates the impact of documentation on a learning group, on a classroom, and the students seven months later. I recommend starting here.

Making Learning Visible

Continuing on in our six-year exploration of documentation in first year General Chemistry at North Seattle College, we took the documentation of a group working on dissociation, showed it to students, then to chemistry faculty, then to a neighboring college for all faculty, then to State Leaders in Teaching and Learning, and finally back to the students at the end of the year. Here is a tour of epistemology—how do we come to understand teaching and learning? Where do we look?

Algebra Learning Group

Watching groups learn in slowed down form enables faculty design more effective learning experiences. Here is one in developmental algebra in Mike Nevin’s classroom at Everett College, where a group of five take on graphing the slope of a linear equation.

Connecting to Children

Imagine all adults worldwide — parents as well as pedagogues — altering their inherited habits of relating to children and, in concert with others, co-constructing a more enhanced way of being for their own children’s benefit. Here is a path for local, cultural, and community growth — very different from traditional approaches to adult education. Participants discover their own values and practice how they decide they want to be with children. Here are materials for free, a leader’s guide and handouts, ready for this year-long study.