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.

#>adult_learning_principles

What Adult Learners Bring

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.

Experience is the material

Adults arrive with years of practice. Good teaching builds on it, and names it, instead of starting from zero.

Problems before subjects

Adults learn fastest toward a problem they already have. Organize around the problem, then reach for the subject it needs.

Self-direction

Adults expect to steer. The teacher's job shifts toward good maps, honest feedback, and materials people can pick up on their own schedule.

Reasons that matter

Motivation is mostly internal: dignity, competence, and a result someone else can use. Say why a skill matters before teaching how.

#>parallel_theories

Parallel and Competing Theories

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

Grundtvig’s folk high schools

From 1844, Danish schools for adults taught through conversation and song, with no exams, aiming at an enlightened public rather than credentials.

wiki: folk high school

Freire: reading the word and the world

Paulo Freire taught adults in Brazil to read by starting from words that mattered in their own lives, so literacy and understanding one’s situation grew together.

wiki: Paulo Freire

#>field_guides

Field Guides

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.