Teaching adults: the ideas put into practice

In one line: adults learn best when teaching starts from their experience and their real problems, and makes clear why it matters. It’s a widely used guide, but more a set of assumptions than a tested theory.

What he did

This isn’t an experiment. Andragogy in Action is a collection. Knowles set out his ideas about how adults learn. Then he gathered about 36 accounts from people using those ideas in real settings: companies, healthcare, government and continuing education. Each account describes a programme and how andragogy shaped it.

The lasting value is the set of ideas, not the case accounts.

What he argued

• Adults direct themselves. As people grow up, they come to see themselves as responsible for their own lives. Treat them as passive listeners and you get resistance before you’ve started.
• Experience is the richest resource. Adults bring experience you can build on. Ignoring it tells people their knowledge doesn’t count, and wastes the best examples in the room.
• Readiness depends on role. Adults are ready to learn what fits their life right now. A nurse about to start supervising students is ready to learn about teaching in a way she wasn’t five years earlier.
• Problems come before subjects. “How do I run a better debrief after a hard shift?” is a better way in than “Let’s study debriefing theory.”
• Motivation is mostly inner (added later). Adults respond more to their own reasons, like doing the job well, than to grades or rules. Rules still have some effect, but on their own they tend to get compliance, not learning.
• Adults need to know why (added later). Before they put in effort, they want to know why it matters.

How much should you trust it?

Widely used, sensible guidance; little direct evidence that it’s a separate theory of how adults learn.

• The case accounts were written by the people running the programmes. They show the ideas in use, but they don’t test them.
• Critics argue the basic way people learn doesn’t change in adulthood. What differs is experience, motivation and context.
• The assumptions describe tendencies, not rules. Many adults need structure in an unfamiliar area, and many children are very self-directed.
• It says little about what to do when learners don’t want to direct themselves, or when the workplace pushes against these methods. That can include some NHS training settings.

If you need to convince someone

In our words (a paraphrase, not a quotation): in most groups, the richest resource for learning is the learners themselves. A teacher’s first job is to find ways to tap into it.

What it means for you

1. Start with their experience. Before you explain anything, find out what people already know and have tried.
2. Say why it matters. Don’t assume it’s obvious. In mandatory training, not explaining why is a common and easily avoided cause of people switching off.
3. Link it to the next shift. Before people leave, they should be able to say what this looks like on their next shift. If they can’t, the session isn’t finished.

How it appears in Teaching That Lands

Knowles shapes how the programme starts and what people work on. Session 1 opens with “What makes a good teacher?”, drawing on people’s own experience before any theory is named. Everyone works on one session they teach, or would like to teach, across all three weeks, so every idea lands on their own material. The facilitator guide treats Knowles’s assumptions as working principles, not rules.

The small print

• Two words. Pedagogy comes from the Greek for leading children. Knowles used it for teacher-led teaching, and andragogy for helping adults learn.
• How many assumptions? Knowles started with four: self-direction, experience, readiness and problem-centred learning. Motivation and the need to know were added in later writing, and different books list them slightly differently.
• Critics. Hartree (1984) argued that andragogy describes an ideal adult learner rather than a theory that applies widely. Merriam (2001) called it a guide to planning rather than a theory of how adults learn.
• The word itself. It was first used in Germany in 1833. Knowles took it up in the 1960s.
• Still in print. The Adult Learner is now in a 9th edition (Knowles, Holton, Swanson and Robinson, 2020).