Learning Science / Andragogy

How Adults Learn

Adults learn from what they have already lived, toward problems they already carry. My focus is adult education: the teams, peers, and mentees who come to software or data with a working life behind them.

My sibling studied Human Development and Family Studies with a concentration in early childhood development, so our family holds both ends of the conversation: how children come to understand the world, and how adults keep learning once the world has asked something of them. Pedagogy on this site is the broader learning science; this route is where the adult side lives.

My take on the difference is about play. There is a self-directed, self-oriented play that wonders outward: that is the pedagogy side. And there is a more refined, introspective practice of play, one that develops wisdom and a recursive relationship with the society and environment a person lives in: that is what this route is for.

Try adapting one small project to your own work. Keep the part that helps and name the assumption that stops fitting.

Malcolm Knowles gave the field its name and a handful of working assumptions. They hold up well as design rules for anything meant to teach a working adult, and they sit comfortably beside the introspective practice of play above.

In the tiny-show exercise, you carry a cue sheet through rules, records, counts, tests, and rehearsal. Its value is easier to judge when you bring a problem you recognize: a scene to stage, a lesson to teach, a meal to prepare, or a release to coordinate.

1. Choose a consequence you care about. “Someone else can run these two cues” is specific enough to observe.
2. Predict before trying. Write what you expect a reordered cue or changed rule to do.
3. Change one thing and watch. Keep the result even when it defeats your prediction. Decide whether the rule, the representation, or your explanation needs work.
4. Try another setting. Reuse the method, restate the assumptions, and name what no longer fits.

For a recipe, a cue becomes a preparation step and availability becomes an ingredient or tool check. But “silent” no longer decides eligibility, and some steps must happen before others. That difference gives you a reason to study dependencies and scheduling.

Keep: one useful procedure, one assumption that failed to transfer, and the next check. Store those beside the original example so your growing understanding has a history.

Knowles wrote from the United States. Adult education was also invented, earlier and differently, in Denmark and in Brazil.

Each guide starts from a person with experience and a question, then points into the topics that answer it. The topic pages are written as building blocks, so a guide can send you to exactly the one you need.