Are Adults Really That Different?
In 1968, Malcolm Knowles popularized the concept of andragogy, which had been coined about 150 years earlier by Alexander Kapp. Knowles asserted that adults are fundamentally different in the way they learn from children and have the following characteristics:
Self-Concept: Adults want agency and choice when it comes to how they learn and how success will be measured.
Experience: Adults learn best when new knowledge is connected to prior learning and their lived experience.
Readiness to Learn: Adults want relevant training/learning that can be applied immediately.
Orientation to Learning: Adults want learning/training to solve real problems they are facing instead of just addressing content and topics.
Motivation to Learn: Adults learn best when they are intrinsically motivated and the learning goals align with their personal/professional goals (Pappas, 2023).
But both the world Kapp and Knowles experienced is fundamentally different than the one we inhabit. When Knowles pushed this narrative, schools followed an Industrial Revolution style of learning with students sitting at desks arranged in grids using their slide rules to solve equations from their textbooks, which I can only assume were printed by Johannes Gutenberg himself.
By the time I left the classroom following the 2021-2022 school year, I was connecting content to student’s prior knowledge and current interests, aligning content to specific learning objectives, showing how the topic we were covering impacted them or could be applied to their lives, using student-choice for assignments and ways to access content, and using project-based learning.
At the risk of sounding like a Knowles-it-all, that sounds familiar. Really familiar.
The only principle of adult learning I didn’t specifically address there was the importance of intrinsic motivation, but you can ask any teacher who has been in the classroom for more than five minutes and every single one will tell you that students learn better when they are intrinsically motivated. Carrots, whether they’re a one-time bonus for adults or a kid getting a prize from the rewards chest using PBIS cash, only go so far, and if you’re resorting to using threats to motivate a class full of teenagers, it’s not going to work. They do not care. At all.
The bottom line is this: Knowles had some excellent points about his principles of learning, but they’re truly age-agnostic. Adults may have different problems to solve and a wider range of experiences to pull from, but good instruction is good instruction, regardless of whether it happens in a conference room or on carpet squares.
Reference
Pappas, C. (2023, September 8). The Adult Learning Theory - Andragogy - of Malcolm Knowles. ELearning Industry. Retrieved December 14, 2024, from https://elearningindustry.com/the-adult-learning-theory-andragogy-of-malcolm-knowles
