Understanding How Adults Learn

As part of our exploration of how to evaluate an effective DEI training program, we'll spend some time this week understanding why it's important that your diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging training partner has expertise that goes beyond DEIB. Sound counterintuitive? Don't worry, we'll get you up to speed!

(Missed Part 1, where we covered that effective DEIB training programs are science-backed? Catch up here!)

Teaching DEIB means more than just "being good at DEIB"

In order to teach something effectively, any instructor must be able to do at least two things well:

1) Understand the content they're trying to teach;

2) Break it down and help others understand it.

This sounds simple at the surface... until we start to consider what this looks like in settings where we're teaching adults to learn to do something new.

Think about it: some people spend entire degrees and even careers understanding how best to teach young people. I know because I learned from many of these people before teaching elementary and middle school! We carefully unpacked everything from "what's the best order to teach phonics, or mathematics?" to "how does the way a little one holds a pencil affect the way they might learn to write?" You can probably imagine literally hundreds of questions that childhood educators ask and answer over the course of their career -- and unless you're a childhood educator yourself, you're probably still just scratching the surface!

Yet, as you know, it certainly isn't true that humans become less complex as they age (!). Throw in all the nuances and subtleties of teaching adults in the environment in which they work (which is the task ahead of us, for those of us implementing workplace DEIB trainings), and all of a sudden we start to illuminate one very important truth:

Regardless of the subject, teaching adults to learn is a skill unto itself.

So now we find ourselves facing an ever-growing challenge: if the content that DEIB trainings teaches is a scholarly discipline and requires a subject-matter expert to teach well, and it's also true that a DEIB trainer needs to have an effective grasp on adult learning methodologies to ensure that the content they're teaching results in true habit formation and behavior change... no wonder it's so difficult to find a DEIB provider. What's an HR professional to do?

Well, friend, that's why I'm writing this series!

The bottom line

During an evaluation period, any DEIB trainer should be able to answer a pointed question about how their learning methodology is tailored for adults and/or workplaces, and how they work to ensure habit formation (aka that what they teach "sticks"). For example, I am the proud author and primary investigator for a body of research around adult learning and online education. 

Hopefully, this has been an illuminating peek into why I'm so proud that BE MORE with Anu's trainings use adult learning methodologies as a foundation, rather than a happy bonus. If you're interested in learning more about how this works, get in touch with us today -- we'd love to walk you through our portfolio!