Compare and contrast the teaching between children and adults.
Back to the teaching life when I was in primary school, I really miss the time that I spent with them, and enjoyed having lunch with them. I did love spending the time with the kids when I was a young teacher as they were sweet and adorable. However, teaching kids and adults learners are completely diverse. Personally, I have learnt a variety of techniques among them:
- Detail-minded and patient
- Explain the content vividly and children always like storytelling
- Tune in to the child and empathise with them
- Become more humorous
- Strict requirements and discipline and monitor them carefully
Photo by Johnny McClung on Unsplash
Since I started to teaching adults, I found out that there is still a big difference between these two groups:
Autonomy
Adult learners are very independent, while children aren’t. It is beneficial to give adults more autonomy in their lessons. You can do this by letting adults work things out for themselves rather than giving them the answers, asking them to organise themselves into pairs instead of allocating partners, and even giving input into the topics or activities of the lessons. With children, it is necessary to fit them accordingly into the plan for the lesson and give them clear instructions, monitor the learners closely and deal effectively with any issues of classroom management.
Learning
Children need to be given a wide variety of activities which relate to the different senses. They are mostly sensory learners and respond well to activities which incorporate similar teaching techniques. The attention span of children is also short, so activities in the classroom shouldn’t take too much time. With adults, it is possible to spend more time on learning tasks as well as to engage them more deeply with the learning materials.
Discipline
It is probably the most obvious different technique in my teaching life. Teaching children is all about being able to deal with discipline calmly and effectively. When teaching adults, disciplines should not be an issue because, well, they’re adults. When teaching online, discipline can be very tricky. Again, it shouldn’t be an issue with them. For children, if a learner is acting out in an online lesson, it may be necessary to speak to their parents privately about the situation.
To compare the teaching between children and adults:
In fact, when teaching adults, some techniques for teaching children can also be applied. For instance, we need to be patient when we are teaching in the classroom as we know there are always some quick but also slow learners. However, it is my responsibility to make sure both of them could manage to learn effectively.
It is very meaningful in my teaching career. I definitely will continue to improve with more different teaching skills that could keep pace with the world. It is because I have always been passionate about teaching. No matter what languages I teach, either in English or Mandarin, I still enjoy and love my teaching life.
