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8 Ways To Make Learning More Fun For Adults
In college, I have this vivid memory of sitting in a 700 person race-relations class in this giant lecture hall and there was a student who was a veteran. He was older than most of the kids in the class, and he was sitting in a row behind this person who was on their laptop in the middle of class as we’re talking about these like socio-economic issues, and she was shopping for something.
I remember that the veteran turned to me and he was furious. He was ticked off that someone could be wasting an education like that. And so, in this video on on how to make learning fun for adults, I want to bring him up and center here because I think and this is a generalization, but I think in general, if you’re an adult in an educational context, whether you’ve gone back for a degree or you’ve never got a degree and you’re coming to get a degree, or you just got out of the military well, whatever reason you’re going back, you probably take learning a little bit more seriously.
You have a bunch more crap going on in your life, right. You might have kids, you might have family, you might have all those stuff going on, and you take learning seriously whereas like, you’re 18, you get to go to college, laid back, whatever. Like learning’s fun because as soon as you get out of class, there’s plenty of things that you can do that are fun. Where as, an adult learner is probably gonna be like, commute to campus, like get their learning done, and leave or maybe even online; even more commonly now. Getting a degree completely online. Taking that learning seriously because there’s some purpose that they are making a sacrifice in the middle of their busier, fuller lives to go back. No one’s paying for their college tuition, that’s on their dime. Well, I guess in the military, the government for his degree, but the point was an adult is a little bit more invested in their education.
The 8 Engaging Ways to Make Learning Fun
I came up with this list of 8 through all of my work with some of the top universities on the planet to help make online and in-person learning more experiential, more engaging. Stop waiting around.
1. Take Learning Seriously
Number 1, I kind of already shared in the intro, but it’s take learning seriously. If you’re designing learning, don’t be flipping in your design. So, you can do things that are fun but if they’re silly and they’re not rooted in purpose, probably not gonna be fun for an adult. When I say fun I mean like “deep fun”, I mean like, “Oh, this is so good. I’m so deeply engaged in this, I’m having a blast learning about astronomy. I did not know that the international space station revolved around the earth at 17,000 miles per hour. That is kind of fascinating. Taking that learning seriously by making sure that the class or the education you’re delivering is of value. Make sure it’s practical, make sure it’s rooted in reality and not just research. An adult has a very low B.S. meter for research that isn’t-research that’s being shared but it’s not rooted in any sort of practice or reality.
2. Start With Prior Knowledge
You’ve got an adult who’s has an entire lifetime of experience, and ideas, and thoughts and opinions. If you teach to them without accessing any of that, you’re (1) wasting their perspective. They have a lot to offer. But, you’re also preventing their engagement because- just imagine for yourself, do you like to be taught about something that you already know? Can you imagine teaching somebody about- in an engineering class about the compounds of steel and what makes steel strong and the structure of an I-beam. Can you imagine teaching that to somebody who worked building bridges for the state for 40 years, and retired and decided he wanted to go back to get an engineering degree to learn- well, hopefully, they had an engineering degree, I guess, if they’re building bridges; you get the idea. You don’t want to be teaching something to somebody who has 10, 20, 30 years of experience in something. And so, accessing that prior knowledge is absolutely essential if you want to engage them in learning. And oftentimes when you access that prior knowledge, you can build upon it. You can, perhaps, invite that’s if they’re comfortable and they want to share-and a lot of adult learners will be happy to share their experience and their wisdom with others. You might have them share a story about their experience and then you relate, and connect your content to their story. That is fun, and meaningful, and engaging for an adult learner.
3. Connect Before Content
It is also a really good way to access prior knowledge. If you’ve seen any of my other videos, you know that I’m obsessed with this idea of connection before content because it’s the cheapest, shortest amount of time, easiest to access way to create a really healthy learning culture. There’s so many studies that when you connect before content- when students connect with their instructor, and they connect with their peers, learning outcomes actually go up. Doing connection before content can be as simple as starting off the class every single day with a question rather than a lecture. Starting off with a question, then people are breaking into small groups and discussing, that’s not totally related to your content. Connection before content ideally should get people in the conversations that they want to have, not conversations that you want them to have. A breakout discussion related to physics that’s like half-way in the class talking about this formula, that is a content discussion. Connection before content brings the humanity and the person into it so, you might be inviting them to share a story. If you’re teaching in a human resources class and you’re talking about risk assessment, you might ask a connection before a content question related to- it might be something like, it might be something like, “What is a risk that you took that really paid off? Get into groups and you got 5 minutes to discuss that, 10 minutes to discuss that before coming back and we’re going to unpack this idea of risk assessment. When you do that, you have everybody come back and popcorn out some of their responses to that, tat’s an amazing amount of data from people’s experiences to be able to pull on and talk about, and relate all the things that were in your PowerPoint deck, or whatever way that you were gonna plan on teaching, relate them to people’s personal stories.
4. Make Conversational Content
If you’ve got content that you’re gonna be teaching, do not talk for longer than18 minutes. Ted.com. There’s a reason they max out their talk length at 18 minutes. Beyond 18 minutes, the brain is gone somewhere else. An adult learner has about 1500 more things to think about, maybe. This is an overgeneralization. They have a lot more to think about potentially; a lot more priorities in their life than somebody who’s only dedicated to going to college, that’s their full time job. An adult learner might have a full-time job and have kids, which are a full-time job, and be married, which is another full-time job. Making that content conversational really involves them in the process and allows them to get present and share their experience throughout, not just at the beginning with that connection before content.
5. Acknowledge Contribution To The Learning Process
Be intentional about thanking them, and appreciating them, and affirming people for sharing their ideas and their perspective with the group even if it differs with your perspective and your opinion, affirming their contribution to the group says to that adult learner, “You belong here. Just because you’re not 18-23 years old- you belong here. I’m glad you’re here.” Acknowledging that contribution is really valuable.
6. Allow Learners To Be The Teachers
One of my favorite ways to do this is by- toward the end of class or instruction. You can do this asynchronously online as well. But, create a little bit of time for tiny teach takeaways. At the end, carve out 5 minutes to split out into small groups and just have everybody share- if they were to remember 1 single idea, nugget, gem, tool, concept from this class a year from now, what would it be? What is their takeaway and get into your group and teach it to a partner; teach it as if you were the teacher. Teach that idea that concept, that takeaway. It works really well because it (1) honors what adults are learning, their perspective. But also, we learn things better when we actually teach them. Is really valuable to be able to create that little miniature time for everybody for every learner to become a teacher.
7. Its Okay To Fail
Make it okay to fail. One of the ways I do that with my groups is that I share- I don’t actually have a resume anymore, I usually just send people a link to like a TEDx talk or a snapshot of some video, or something that I’ve led and say, “You want to work together?” That’s enough of a resume for the way that I work with clients anymore. But I do have a failure resume. If you want to make it okay to fail, invite everybody to create a failure resume. Get a blank, 8 and a half by 11 piece of paper and say, “At the end of the semester, I want you to have at least 3 things on your failure resume that were risks that you took in class. You tried to share something, you did something that was a little bit unconventional on a project or in an assignment, and I want it to be okay to fail.” I don’t mean fail the class or fail the assignment necessarily, but I mean taking enough risks that you’re doing something different that’s not just like, boring run-of-the-mill.
8. Promote Creativity By Inviting A Failure
Promote a little bit of creativity by inviting that failure. 8, one of my favorites. Got this phrase from a mentor of mine who I absolutely love and appreciate, it’s an idea of reminding and all students, actually, that they are the experts of their own experience. They’re not the expert maybe on the topic that you’re teaching, but they are the experts of their own experience. Nobody knows their life better- their life, their context, their situation, their prior knowledge better than they do. Often times when I share that with people, I’ll also say, “I invite you- because you’re the expert of your own experience, I actually invite you to ruthlessly steal and reinterpret every single thing that I say and apply it to your own context and your own life to make sure that it’s actually valuable. I don’t want this class to be a waste of time. I want it to be really useful to you.” That’s a neat way that you can create that engagement. Awesome hanging out! If you want to bring me on to your organization to help make learning engagement fun, contact me below. If not, this video on how to make learning fun is a great follow-up to this one. It’s short, it’s only a few minutes and it unpacks a really lovely idea, a simple concept that totally flips learning on its head to allow you to make learning fun for all, not just adults.