What new insights have you gained in terms of the variety of roles that adult educators play?

Nowadays, adult education has become more and more popular. People no longer stay for a job during a whole life, and they may change their career according to the interest or the location, therefore, lifelong education or lifelong learning has become quite prevalent. How to make “adult education” more effective and efficient?  Besides the adult learners themselves, I believe that adult instructors must play a critical role in the entire study process.  

Traditionally, we view adult educator as a presenter or a just a lecturer. However, with the development of adult education, the role of adult instructor is various.

First, as an instructor of adult education, the teacher is more like a “guider”. Adult are different from teenagers. They have their own working and life experience, and they have their own learning habits and learning philosophy.  Therefore, the main role of an instructor is just to guide the direction and resources in the class, then the adults may follow the direction and search the materials accordingly.

Second, the role of adult educator may be game-partner or facilitator. Undoubtedly, adults have something in common with teenagers. For example, both of them would like to obtain new knowledge through some games, pictures, and videos, which may impress them deeply. Hence, we instructor should not only strictly teach the materials but also play games actively in class. Setting a good learning environment for students is the duty of adult instructor. 

Third, adult instructor should be a good listener and friend of his or her friends. Only when your students believe in you can you teach effectively and freely. I used to have an adult student who wrote email to me saying that his life was quite tough at that time, and he had to do many part-time jobs to support his family. After replying his email, I suddenly found that he studied harder and more confident than before. Since then, we communicated with each other through the email frequently to discuss the problems he encountered in his life or in his study. As a result, his score of that semester was much better than before. Most students need a listener other than their parents. So, why don’t we instructors become their good listener and friends to enhance our teaching performance?

Fourth, to be a good instructor, one must be good at learning--not only the breakthrough in our own fields but also those new advanced technologies, which means the instructor himself/herself should be a lifelong learner as well. On one hand, we share the knowledge from library or some academic resources, on the other hand, for a good instructor, we must be able to search the latest information from the internet, apps, blogs, or other means of multimedia. Otherwise, we could not follow the trends our students follow, which makes our courses difficult to precede.

Of course, there are many other roles that adult instructors must undertake to make the teaching experience better and thus enhance the performance of both teachers and students. 

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Author: Stephen Downes   Written on: December 6, 2010  
Retrieved Feb 23,2014 
From  http://www.downes.ca/post/54312