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Ten Tips to Professionals for Involving Adult Learners
- It is better to invite two learners to attend rather than one. This
allows for flexibility in attendance and also for mutual support.
- It is essential to ensure that travel or related expenses are met
before meetings, unless arranged otherwise. Adult learners cannot be
expected to find money for travel or subsistence.
- Costs to cover dependent care need to be offered and met and an understanding
about this needs to made clear at the beginning.
- An individual learner may be available in the early days but, with
growing confidence and new opportunities, that availability may decrease
with time. A process whereby new adult learners are involved should
be put in place.
- If a learner will lose a day’s pay by attending the meeting,
compensation for that pay should be covered. When professionals attend
a meeting they usually do so as part of their paid job.
- A provider representative from the relevant meeting should be allocated
to ‘look after’ the adult learners so they have a point
of contact and can take the time to fill in any background and or jargon
that may arise.
- Consideration needs to be given to the timing of meetings. Meetings
need to be easy to get to, and the timing needs to be appropriate for
people with children who have to travel long distance. Adult learners
cannot attend meetings during their working hours.
- It should be clarified beforehand what the purpose of the learner’s
presence at the meetings will be. They should play an equal role to
the professionals, or else their presence might become tokenistic. As
little jargon as possible should be used in meetings, and patronising
should be avoided.
- Adult learners will come with passion and commitment to do a ‘job’
– if they see that their enthusiasm is not being utilised they
will be disappointed and stop attending. Commitment must be there on
both sides to make it work.
- Adult learners will benefit from training in ‘Meetings Skills’
or ‘Presentation Skills’.
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