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.

I always find it disturbing the number of students who either don't know how to recognize acceptable sources of information and/or receive their information from merely one source. To my first point, in eight years of teaching I have always had at least one student reference Wikipedia as a source. Secondly, with ten media conglomerates controlling all forms of media worldwide, I like to remind students that we need to be critical of the information being broadcast to us be it print or televised media. I tell them to pay particular attention to the motivation behind the "stories" that are shared with viewers.

I taught rhetoric at Roosevelt Academy in The Netherlands for a year and found one of the most important things to discuss with students early in the term is how to both be aware of and avoid arguments based on fallacy. Often times individuals recognize the fallacy in the argument but continue to try debate it using reason. Being able to identify and label fallacious arguments when they are first presented saves a great deal of time. My disciplines are Communication and Sociology, and I've found it very beneficial to introduce my students in both courses to this concept.

More and more students aren't willing to take the time to find answers they want someone to give it to them.As an example when I taught them coding I looked up some silly or really strange codes for them to find. It made the class and learning process more fun

Many students are uncomfortable speaking out in class. S I liked the idea of starting out with simple nonthreatening questions

I do a power point every night. So to try and keep the attention of everyone at the end of these I ask specific questions pertaining to the power point and then after the student has answered I go further by asking him his opinion and would he do things differently. If so what would he do to change things? If he wouldn't change anything what was it that made him feel everything was so perfectly right. I don't do this in an attacking way -I just want them to think.

I am going to try scaffolding. I think it will work great with new students.

I like the pretest method. I am going to use this next term.

I find with trade students love the hands on. It seems they pick up great knowledge from it.

Critical thinking requires reasoning and the ability to ask questions taking advantage of the many resources avaliable to the student. Critical thinkers need to know what 'makes then tick' so they know which angle to take when confronted with a paarticular situation and then over time judgement will be developed

to better understand critical thinking it is important to be patient to stand back assess the information and analize the content being presented. One should qestion and repeat critical thinking exercises to get a better understanding of it's benifits

It is very important to me as an Instructor to learn each students learning style. Everyong retains infomation differently.

I have found that within one class that there are students that have different levels of intellegence. Some are logical while others are more body/kinetic in their intellegence having to experience a problem before they can find a solution for it. The older the student the more analytical they tend to be and the better critical thinker. Do you think that experience is a critical factor?

I realize that scaffolding is a temporary device that is used to learn new information and strategic integration is developing learned stuff that can be applied. Does strategic integration replace scaffolding in the learnng process as the learner becomes more independent?

I plan to use judicious review to help students better integrate what they are learning into their skill set overtime to prevent automatic deletion so that they can transfer the new content/skill into a service learning experience that will help the students to increase their confidence and decrease the risk of failure.

The realization that instructors need to assist adult learners to reset their mind filters (deletion, distortion and generalization) so that they will be able to delete information that does not have relevancy and keep/store non-distorted knowledge, skills and attitudes needed in long-term memory to perform both concrete and abstract thinking will help me to better understand how to structure learning activities so that the student is not overwhelmed in the learning process.

I find it interesting that students discover their own strengths and weaknesses relating to short and long term memory. I find there are usually students who excel in practical or theory classes..I try to think of new ways to help them learn all of the information to help pass theory exams. The practical exams are usually easier for them.

While lecturing in any course I try to add both concrete, and abstract learning into class discussions. I have a hard time adding hands on learning to lecture courses though. Games are one way, but I do not use them. What other ways can I encorporate hands on learning into a lecture class?