In my job I spend the majority of my time teaching adults how to integrate technology into their daily instruction. I love my job! That being said I have spent a lot of time lately thinking about the preparations that I do teaching adults compared to when I go into a classroom full of students and how different the two groups really are.
When I was in the classroom, I had learning outcomes, planned the activities (knowing full and well that some wouldn't get done and some would be modified for each class), and we would move forward. There would be weeks that all would go relatively close to how I had planned, and weeks that I would scrap it all ten minutes into the first lesson of the week. Either way, the students were always up for it. If I said to them, "Hey guys, I don't think what I had planned is going to work. How about we try something else?" They would follow me into the supply room and help me carry out all the new supplies for the day and we would all learn together - and we all loved it that way.
The first session I did on my own in this job was a total disaster. I tried to do a hands-on educaching session with middle school teachers. I basically went in, told them what geocaching and educaching is, showed them how to use the GPS units, and sent them on their way. It was a total disaster! I had complaints that there weren't enough hand-outs, complaints that I didn't explain enough about how GPS works, complaints that we didn't find enough caches together, and even more complaints that I can't even remember. On top of all that, someone complained to my boss and he told me he was already thinking that he had may have made the wrong choice in chosing me for the job. Needless to say, I was totally devastated. From then I went into planning overdrive for the next six months. Every time I had a training session, I spent hours planning, anticipating participant questions, creating hand-outs and "quick start" guides, and basically structuring every minute of the session. After six months I still had complaints that I didn't have enough hand-outs, or the right hand-outs, or didn't do enough step-by-step instruction. After a while, I realized that I wasn't enjoying teaching anymore. Not only that, but I was only teaching people how to use the tools. I wasn't modeling the kind of integration that I wanted others to do. In other words, I wasn't doing my job.
So I had to do some major self-reflection to get moving down the right path again. I knew that I was a good classroom teacher and I knew that I had things to share with teachers. I just had to figure out where the disconnect was. I realized that the reason my teachers weren't responding the way my students had was because they were of different generations. I had never really taken time to internalize the major differences between the education styles of "Generation Y" and previous generations. Teachers wanted step-by-step because that was the way they had been taught when they were in school. The only way to get teachers to move away from that model is to push them out of it, but support needs to be provided.
With this new "revalation" (which many, many, many before me had already experienced) I re-invented myself as an instructional technology specialist. I still spend large amounts of time planning training sessions, but my sessions are now almost exclusively hands-on and learner centered. I still make hand-outs, but they are more along the lines of a guided notes outline than the whole printed slide-shows from before. Additional support pages and references are posted to the web and participants are pointed to them if they feel the need to print them. I've also started implementing multiple types of resources and differentiation into sessions in order to catch all learning styles and allow learners to go where their needs take them.
In all, I think that I have become more effective and affective in my position and that I am still postively impacting students. I have come to really love my job and the continual learning and growing that comes with it. I find myself actually grateful for all those complaints in that first session. If it weren't for those complaints, who knows how long I would have wandered down that winding, inefficient, and ineffective path.
Image courtesy of Pablo Barra and Flickr
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