Teaching Methodology
Pedagogy, known by many to be the science of teaching, actually refers to ‘leading the child’ in its Greek translation. Over the last 150+ years, research into the science of teaching adults specifically has led to the term Andragogy being used. Translated, this means ‘leading the adult’ in Greek.
Adults learn in a different way from children. Most notable in this field is the research and work of Malcolm Knowles. His conclusions define a number of key differences:
- Adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction.
- Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for learning activities.
- Adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance to their job or personal life.
- Adult learning is problem-centred rather than content-oriented.
In late 1997, Daryle Abrahams undertook research into what it takes to create an effective leadership development programme for application in the corporate world. Through work with a number of consultancy firms at the time, and his own research Daryle developed his main product, “How to Manage Things and Lead People”. Teetch Ltd now provides this product across the corporate world at senior levels to small, high-potential, high-performance groups of professionals.
Corporate adult education, based upon Teetch Ltd’s research needs specific ingredients to be effective. This document lays the foundation for exactly what is required to make senior leadership development effective.
- The student must be willing to learn. We have found this to be true and in our latest research discovered evidence from the field of neuroscience to support this. The brain is more receptive to connections where the individual is motivated to learn (Norman Doidge).
- Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for learning activities. Our programme is based upon a series of small group activities where the experience of the students is applied to their programme-based research on a given topic. This is later combined and subsequently applied in a business setting.
Secondly we run programmes that are designed around the concept of stimulus, application, review, conclusion and around again to application. Our events are specifically run with application in mind. This creates a new set of experiences from which students learn.
In the past, attendance at ‘training programmes’ has been an event, rather than part of a behavioural change initiative. We’ve found, over ten years of running the programme, that if you task students with applying what they’ve learned, knowing that they’ll be expected to explain their application and ensuing success or failure, that they very soon put their lessons into practice. Thus, they create new experiences based upon their new ideas, usually leading to a positive change in results. - Adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance to their job or personal life. Teetch Ltd advises a thorough needs analysis, before any programme is designed, to suit the content to the group. Every student is interviewed to understand their history, current role, future aspirations and requirements from the ensuing programme. They are then taken through content and challenged at each event to plan how they will put their lessons into practice.
- Adult learning is problem-centred rather than content-oriented. Each student is tasked with research prior to learning events. The aim is to engage the student with the topic and for them to find relevance to their current role/environment. They then teach their colleagues what they’ve learned and take forward what is relevant into a meeting with their manager subsequent to the event. At that stage they’re tasked with planning how they’ll put what they’ve learned into practice in their immediate future tasks to improve on-the-job performance.
To summarise, we believe from our own experience, research into modern andragogy and evidence from the fields of neuro-psychology and neuroscience, that adults learn best where they want to learn, have the opportunity to practice what they’ve learned, where what they’re learning is relevant and where learning is based upon activity rather than theory or research alone. Ours is an Andragogic approach AND an ongoing research project into what else we can do to advance the science of teaching adults.
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