EDU6600: Adult Learning

My current experience with adult learning in my work site, varies between professional development opportunities.  There are professional development opportunities that,"make learning both an active and interactive process," (Zepeda, 2012, p. 48) but not all professional development opportunities fall into that category.  There are many activities that have a speaker up front and staff sitting and listening.  There is little to no interaction, or activity during the professional development.  There is also no differentiation at our administrator led professional development activities.  There is some differentiation throughout the school year from professional development activity to the next, however, not in an individual administrator led professional development opportunity.  "To support teachers as learners, the principal needs to ensure that there are professional development opportunities that are developmentally appropriate and differentiated based on the very characteristics of the teachers at the site" (Zepeda, 2012, p. 49).  Our required professional development days do not cater to the varying levels of staff at our school.  They are blanket activities for the entire staff.  With this method of professional development, there are always staff members who feel that the training did not apply to them, they got nothing out of it, and/or it was simply a waste of time.  I agree with Zepeda that, "Professional development needs to be situated within the school year as a proactive proccess, not as a "fix-it" intervention merely to remediated perceived weaknesses in teacher performance" (Zepeda, 2012, p. 51).  Many times my principal will use professional development as a reactive intervention instead of a proactive process.

I do not believe my thinking has changed in regards to adult learning.  As an adult learner, just like many in class pointed out, it is easy to identify learning opportunities where learning truly happened and learning opportunities where the learning fell short.  I think the reading around adult learning confirmed what I believed about myself as an adult learner and what a professional development activity should look like to gain the most buy in and most success in implementation from a staff.  I am going to be using what I have learned in this next week as I work with a team to provide a differentiated professional development for my staff around culturally responsive teaching strategies.

As I briefly mentioned above, learning about adult learning could not have come at a better time for me.  A group of teachers and myself will be running the staff professional development coming up at the end of this week.  As I think about how I am going to present my portion of the professional development, I am thinking about the information I have learned regarding how adults learn.  I also think about the different professional development activities that provided the most impact on my learning.  Working with my team, I have relayed the ideas from Professional Development that Works.  We are going to be providing four mini sessions for staff to choose from providing staff with choice in regards to what they are learning about.  We are also going to run our mini sessions like a miniature version of our own classrooms.  Staff will be interacting with each other and the new strategies they are learning.  I am looking forward to implementing my new/updated learning around adult learning.  We are also going to be offering ourselves as resources for staff as they are trying out the new strategies.  Like Zepeda said when talking about ways to engage adult learners, we will be using, "small-group activities through which learners have the opportunity to reflect, analyze, and practice what they have learned" (Zepeda, 2012, p. 48).