How to Teach Adults: Plan Your Class, Teach Your Students, Change the World, Expanded Edition

To understand this book properly, the reader must grasp that Spalding has taught English as a Second Language (ESL) classes to adults for several years. He is engaged in self-education and in innovation of education for other groups. In the final chapter of this book, he lays out an ambitious vision for what public education has to offer America in our time.

He addresses learning for adults primarily in a classroom environment (such as with his ESL classes), not in graduate school nor informally in a workplace. As such, he misses the mark in terms of what adult education is about. Much of adult education happens in unstructured (or even pseudo-structured) environments like churches. People learn from each other in an ad hoc manner. Or show more they read something (say, on the Internet) that teaches them about something else and discuss it with friends, family, or colleagues. In my experience, adult education – even in more formal graduate schools – is focused on efficient learning but not as much on the formalities of a teacher/student dichotomy.

I personally aim to teach and to learn in every environment I’m engaged with. I keep a book blog; I coordinate a Sunday School class for adults; I develop software with co-workers and discuss learnings; I lead discussions about that software with computer users; I talk over life with my daughter at the dinner table; etc. I’m interested in how to make those relationships adhere to efficient two-way knowledge exchange. This book frankly did not hit that sweet spot. It did point me to some resources that might, however.

This book’s audience is those engaged with teaching adults in formal (classroom) environments. It goes into detail about the issues educators might face and pushes the envelope about how to adapt those environments to contemporary needs. It adapts how schools of education teach teachers to adult learning contexts. This is a very necessary task; it just doesn’t fit my personal situation. It would have been nice to have a chapter (or even a series of chapters) on how to teach adults in non-classroom environments, where most adults spend most of their time. This could include in informal relationships, through group presentations, in meetings, or by technology and media.

The book did close strong by dwelling on two important issues for every American teacher: how to grow personally and where American education ought to go corporately. Clearly, Spalding cares about his profession and about his own and his students’ places in the world. His pedagogy is informed by his life, and vice versa. Professional teachers in particular will benefit from his approach. show less

A great introduction to teaching methods and techniques for people who find themselves in the position of teaching adults and have no idea what they're doing.