My experience is that the older student has more motivation and can adapt to various learning strategies with relative ease. The younger students seem to believe that learning will occur with very little investment on their part.

The use of a variety of instructional methods can help students with learning and retention.

One of the challenges of teaching adult learners of different age groups is the diversity and degree of thier motivation to learn. As pointed out in this course most of your younger learners even though they are young adults tend to have that high school mentality. where as the older adults can see the benifits of learning new task. Without being to much of a displenarian an instructor has to find some way to motivate all of his class regardless of age or attitude. One way I do this is by telling them the different methods that I do not do well in when learning something new. This lets them see me as more human and down to earth and makes them more willing to listen and partisipate in whatever activities I arrange for them.

I feel it is very important to examine the steps to problem solve and follow them accordingly. I notice with my students that they want to skip steps and still try to achieve the end result.

In regards to my students, problem solving for them equates with survival. At times, they cannot see the difference and have difficulty grasping that they actually can work through solutions.

I have a student population in which the majority of students do carry this sense of entitlement. Sometimes, it can be challenging to work with but definitely rewarding when you see that student come around.

I am currently teaching a Sociology class with 40 students. It is amazing to see those students use analytical skills and discover that they can indeed embark on the entire process of critical thinking. This is a real self-esteem enhancer.

Has anyone read The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer and what are you thoughts about his community of truth?

As a Respiratory Instructor I find it difficult to encourage students to use critical thinking skills. I am not sure if it is due to the lack of knowledge of what critical thinking is.

I like the idea of uding graphic organizers to help students identify the key points. They can also help when having the students summarize the into at the end of class for better learning.

As a clinical instructor I plan touse judicious review at the clinical site with the students skills as well as helping them to review and link they information they are using in their theory classes.

learning the scaffold and recording strategies makes a great deal of sense as well as the acronmin

assessing the students, better prepares for a progression of the course should take where to stress more areas of importance.

different ways of learning some visual, logical etc we see this all the time. a lot of students like to see one do one teach one.

short term long term memory extremely important in medicine as well helps us with disease diagnosis.

SInce everyone has intelligence, it can be helpful to the students to help them discover their strogest area of intelligence. This can really boost their self-confidence, willingness and ability to learn by helping them see they ways they are intelligent (especially if it is in the non-traditional way). Placing a value on all intelligences will make the student realize the intelligence within themselves to give them more confidence to learn in more situations.

I think one of the biggest barriers that students in the VN program face is that overloaded overhwhelmed feeling. Helping the students to use their working memory to incorporate episodic and somantic memories is one of our biggest jobs as instructors.

Adult learners at our school have a hard time getting back into the groove of the formal school setting. They get easily frustrated when they see young students grasping concepts and doing well on tests. I often calm them down, and encourage them not to be too hard on themselves. It takes time to get back into the learning groove.

I do a lot of group work in my courses that require critical thinking skills. Students are presented with various scenarios in which they have to determine the best solution to the problem. I've found that students seem to learn a great deal simply by listening to the experiences of other group members, and their ultimate conclusions are almost always much more effective when they come up with solutions as a group rather than individually.

At the end of every term I hand out a course survey to students, in addition to the one distributed by my university. I've found it very helpful when planning the course for the following term. I enjoy reading about what students say they learned or took away from the course and I benefit from reading about what concepts they struggled with. I would become very bored with my profession if I didn't adapt/update the course each term.