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You’ve identified your audience and learning objectives, crafted your narrative, and developed your slide deck; you’re ready.

Whether you're in a boardroom, a conference hall, or even in virtual environments, your goals for delivering instructional content to adults should remain the same: You need to engage (and perhaps inspire!) your learners, convey your content effectively, and leave a lasting impression on them that contributes to their professional skills and ultimately impacts their performance as a practitioner in the RMI industry.

  • Focused But Flexible

  • It’s All About Context

  • Deliver Your Authentic Self

Below you’ll find a series of tips and techniques to help prepare you for the classroom..

Focused But Flexible

First and foremost, it’s important to stick to the learning objectives you established early in your introduction. You identified those as key takeaways for your learners in the planning stages—these are skills you want them to be able to apply as working professionals in the industry—and if you find yourself straying from them, you’ll need to course correct.

The trick, then, is to balance a rigid focus on your learning objectives with a variety of instructional methods. Research suggests that adults’ attention spans begin to wane around the 20-minute mark (Cooper & Richards, 2016). As such, regularly pivoting to different modalities of instruction over the course of a session can help keep your learners present and engaged. Simply put, dynamic instruction (incorporating lecture, knowledge checks, discussion questions, etc.) improves learning outcomes because it regularly demands engagement from the learner.

It’s All About Context

Framing instruction around common problems and experiences in the industry is critical for adult learners. They thrive when instruction is pragmatic, significant and relevant to the position they’re in or the position they’re looking to grow into, and are eager to connect existing knowledge with your instructional content.

While learning objectives for adults address why they should learn something, instructional content should regularly reinforce how learners can apply it in the industry. Below are a few strategies to get at that how.

  • Simple rhetorical devices can go a long way in recognizing your learners’ current contributions to and experiences in the profession. Variations of “You’ve probably” statements (e.g., “You’ve probably worked with a client who…”), for instance, help anchor learners in context they’re familiar with, allowing them to make more meaningful connections between old content and new content.

  • Providing examples, or better yet, working through real-world scenarios (e.g., “Let’s say Thomas is approached by a competitor…”) helps adult learners bind key concepts to familiar workplace responsibilities. That ready-to-perform assurance can make instruction more engaging, memorable, and meaningful.

    When it comes to incorporating examples into instruction, Harrington and Zakrajsek (2017) are prescriptive: Each big idea (e.g., learning objective) should be accompanied by two examples, and each can be made more effective when paired with a strong visual aid.

  • Modeling works particularly well for process- and operationally-oriented instruction. While examples direct the instructor and learners to a real or hypothetical scenario using third-person pronouns (e.g., she, it, they), modeling positions the instructor within the scenario using first-person pronouns (e.g., I, me). In this instance, the instructor is completing a task and showcasing a skillset in front of learners who will be expected to complete a similar task in their professional careers.

Deliver Your Authentic Self

Above all, it’s important to be you. Best practices can help you refine your existing approach to adult education, but they shouldn’t replace who you are, your personality, your values, your experiences as a professional in the field.

At times, however, our desire to appear credible and authoritative in a professional setting can hinder our ability to be effective instructors. Below are a few tips and tricks to keep it real.

  • Simple, conversational language has been proven to yield more effective learning outcomes than formal language (Mayer, 2009, as cited in Harrington & Zakrajsek, 2017). Simply put, concepts can be complex, but it’s up to you to explain them in the simplest terms possible. That means eliminating jargon, most acronyms and initialisms, business speak (e.g., “synergies,” “core competencies”), and even some industry terminology that may be exclusive to specific areas of the business.

    A good way to keep things conversational is to recognize and respond to your audience with snap polls, temperature checks, and rhetorical and non-rhetorical questions (e.g., “How might you handle a situation like that? How would that make you feel?”) to ensure that learners feel actively seen and heard. Providing time for learners to contribute to a session or even just self-reflect gives learners agency; they are active participants, not passive observers

  • Invoking your professional experiences, particularly times when you’ve found a solution to a common professional challenge, is a perfect way to position yourself as an ally and fellow practitioner. You’re not teaching from a book but from lived experience, and for many learners, that will create an immediate connection between them, their experience, you, and your content.

  • Your passion for the industry can be infectious; it inspires learners and encourages them to connect with your content. As noted by Harrington and Zakrajsek (2017), enthusiasm and positive energy can keep your learners, particularly those whose experience with the content is limited, engaged, attentive, and better positioned to learn.

References

Cooper, A.Z., & Richards, J.B. (2016). Lectures for adult learners: Breaking old habits in graduate medical education. The American Journal of Medicine, 130(3), 376-381. https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(16)31217-7/fulltext

Harrington, C., & Zakrajsek, T. (2017). Dynamic lecturing: Research-based strategies to enhance lecture effectiveness. Stylus.