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Anita Lanier
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Blog Comment
Ditto to that. I am a teacher of massage and a student of acupuncture, formerly a K-8 teacher for 10 years. I think my Traditional Chinese Medicine instructors would have NO idea about what to do with being told to adjust to our learning styles. As _adult_ students we just suck it up and LEARN THE MATERIAL and it is a crazy amount of memorization. As adults, we take responsibility for forming study groups, creating our own guides and tools. So yes, it is important to understand learning styles and to vary teaching techniques, but even with massage, we have… >>>
Discussion Comment
We can spoon-feed content, provide timely feedback, teach with expertise and clarity, evaluate with fair standards, and also share our experiences, but at some point students are responsible for being self-motivators. They come to us with 18+ years of life experience. While I believe a massage certification program can be transformational as it was for me, and is for many students, I'm not sure how to "motivate" those (thankfully few) students who seem to have little idea of why they are in the program and want to skate through with as little effort as possible. My main technique is holding… >>>
Discussion Comment
At my school the courses are all offered numerous times throughout the year. Each 8 week session always has students who need to withdraw and then they re-enroll later. This means that I will occasionally have students from the previous instructor in my course from week 6, for example. It makes continuity difficult as an instructor.
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Dr. Meers,
You are absolutely correct in how the group dynamics vary from class to class. My classes are less than 12 students and very hands-on, so 2 or 3 dysfunctional personalities can really influence the dynamic of the class if I don't set expectations right away. My students come to me in a group, so their relationships are already set up because they've often had at least 2 classes together as group.
It is important to understand and even sympathize with the stresses adult learners have - as a graduate student myself (in Acupuncture), I am much more flexible… >>>