I’m going to so something that is totally contrary to current marketing schemes. In fact, I have just eliminated all the hype from this home page. Gone is the sales pitch marketing experts say to make. Honestly, I value authenticity over come-ons and hooks to bait you for a sale. I am simply going to tell you my story. How I got interested in designing and facilitating adult learning experiences. If you resonate with my story, then continue reading about becoming a Certified Facilitator of Adult Learning. Whether you enroll in this course or not, I wish you all success and joy in your journey through life. Dr. Jill Henry,EdD
Imagine we are sitting together on my porch in the Smoky Mountains just talking. Here’s how I arrived at the creation of Certified Facilitator of Adult Learning and why I am offering the course to you now.
My Initial Training
I graduated from The Ohio State University as a physical therapist. After spending two years in clinical practice, I was asked to teach in a community college physical therapist assistant program. I had no teaching experience. And to this day I have no idea how the students that first year learned anything from me. I’d give a lecture, have a quick discussion, demonstrate a technique, and then give an exam. It was all about me. I prepared the lecture. I got the equipment ready for the demonstration. I made up the exams. My students had to sit and listen to me and then respond to my negative energy when they didn’t understand or do well on their exams.
One day several of my students, came into my office and asked me why I didn’t like them. Didn’t like them? Where did that come from? I didn’t understand and asked them how they got that idea. Their response changed my life. I realized that I was not teaching them, but talking at them and expected them to learn from what I said. (I later learned that retention rate 2 weeks after a lecture is only 5%.) When students did poorly on their exams I considered it their fault for not listening to me. I was putting stress and blame on them for my poor teaching style, which was not a style at all, just me trying to figure out how to teach.
I asked the students for their ideas, for what they thought would help them learn. And wow did they have them. They wanted field trips – to a rehab center to see how patients worked to build strength, to a hospital and even to observe a surgery. They wanted case studies to figure out what they could and could not do with certain patients. They wanted to be involved in the learning process. I am to this day grateful for the courage it took for those students to talk with me.
Second teaching position
Two years into teaching at the community college level I attended a workshop at a major university and during the workshop the Director of the Physical Therapy program asked me to join the faculty as an instructor. Here we go again – I had a bachelor’s degree, two years experience teaching, and I still didn’t really know how to teach. I took the position.
Best career decision I ever made. The director became my mentor. Bella was her name. During her doctoral studies, she worked with Malcom Knowles, the Father of Adult Learning and frequently brought him to campus for faculty workshops.
From Bella and Malcolm I learned that:
• Learning procedures by “show and tell” does not prepare students for a profession or career or job.
• Facts change. Procedures change. What prepares students for the future is learning how to think, solve problems, and apply critical thinking skills in different situations.
• Knowledge alone is not enough to be successful in any field.
• Developing attitudes and values are just as important as memorizing information.
• To be effective, teaching must be competency-based and learner-centered, not teacher-centered. It’s easy to prepare a lecture. It’s more difficult to write an objective that tells the learner specifically what they will be learning and design experiences so they can reach the objective.
I remember late-night faculty meetings where I would present learner-centered objectives for the next course I was going to teach and those objectives would be reviewed, modified, and eventually approved BEFORE I wrote the first lecture or planned the first learning experience. Objectives were so important to the curriculum that every course objective from every professor was reviewed by the entire faculty before being accepted for teaching.
Along came the meeting with Dr. W. Edwards Deming
Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the Father of Total
Quality Management was a statistician and business consultant. By the time I met Dr. Deming I had attained my Doctorate Degree in Adult Education from the University of Georgia and moved on from my faculty position to corporate training in local business, industries, and school systems. As a member of my city’s Chamber of Commerce, I attended several of Dr. Deming’s workshops and became highly involved in TQM (Total Quality Management) training in the city. Dr. Deming’s approach was about empowering the worker to participate in the work process. This approach integrated perfectly with adult learning. Education is all about empowering the learner to learn.
Then to Now
During the 1980 and 1990’s I traveled across the USA and Canada teaching college teachers and clinical therapists how to teach, and teaching trainers how to organize business and industry training based on Active Adult Learning. My husband and I moved to the Smoky Mountains and I brought the culmination of my experiences online as Certified Facilitator of Adult Learning course. Over the years I’ve been teaching teachers how to teach by helping them improve their courses through online study and personal feedback. My participants have ranged from Judges and Lawyers to Corporate Development Teams. From Nursing and Allied Health Educators to Girl Scout Leaders, from Math Teachers to Telecoms Trainers and from Hospice workers to Shamans. All have learned how to design their own unique training courses and workshops using adult learning techniques.
I hope I have piqued your interest and you continue to explore this website to see if CFAL is a fit for you. I’d love to work with you to create an exceptional learning experience for whoever you are teaching!
Dream
What are your dreams when you think about teaching? Do you dream about standing in front of a room full of people at a conference? Giving a community talk at your local library? Providing training for the staff at your business? Conducting a Zoom workshop? Teaching-Coaching one-on-one? Bring your ideas and dreams to CFAL and let us help you create and facilitate meaningful learning experiences beyond typical lectures and discussions.
Design
When you enroll in CFAL, you progress at your own pace, in your own environment, using your own materials. CFAL course design may be looked at as a “plug and play”. You “plug” your content, your expertise into a system of education that is designed to develop your own confidence and competence as well as in those you teach. Along the way you interact with an educational expert 7 times to guide your way.
Facilitate
When you have completed CFAL you have a complete design for the course or class or workshop you intend to conduct. If your course is through Zoom, you’ve got it! Or by Zoom and live audience, you can handle it because you have planned what you are doing and how you are doing it. Presenting to 500 people, no problem. Teaching a group of 20 at your local library, you know what to do.
CFAL is a Process Course
You learn a process of education that you use over and over again. You develop the reputation of being a “natural teacher” because you have integrated this process in everything you do. Yes there are natural teachers who by their strong empathy and intuition know just what to do and when to do it. Yet if you ask them how they know how to teach they will tell you that they learned the hard way, by trial and error. Or they will tell you about the train the trainer workshop that turned their view of teaching around. Or how, as in my case, they pursued higher education because they wanted to know everything they could about this process of teaching and learning.
I look forward to see the lightbulbs go off over your heads as you “get it” and discover a different way of looking at teaching and learning than you had before. What you teach after taking this course may not change, but how you teach it will. You will have more enjoyment, more time, better rapport with others as you watch them grow in confidence and competence.
To your success!
Jill Henry, EdD
