“Learning involves change. It is concerned with the acquisition of habits, knowledge, and attitudes enabling the individual to make both personal and social adjustments” (Knowles, Holton, and Swanson, 2005, p. 11). It’s generally recognized that different learners acquire knowledge differently thus requiring diverse approaches to be adapted to remove obstacles that hamper learning. Since knowledge is a “powerful currency” providing vast opportunities in today’s world, it is necessary to possess competitive knowledge (Abowitz and Roberts, 2007, p. 471).
However, the acquisition of knowledge is a long process that embraces different stages and approaches depending on the student’s proficiency level, their ability to establish objectives, to understand the needs and obligations, to consider their individual experiences, talents, prior learning, a cultural and social background that dramatically affect the process of learning (Alexander and Winne, 2006, p. 665). Thus, supporting learners’ autonomy and self-assessment and self-directing, orienting and motivating students, boosting learners’ confidence and growth, allows achieving efficient results in education.
Taking into account Thomas Friedman’s approach to social development who posits that “the world is flat”, i.e. the world is defined by two principles: openness and collaboration traced on societal, institutional, and individual levels. In other words, as far as education and learning are concerned, openness fosters competitiveness between students which, in its turn, improves learning; collaboration allows gaining more expertise and outreach providing extensive educational opportunities (Abowitz and Roberts, 2007, p. 471). Thus, the main objective in class is to maintain a competitive atmosphere encouraging students of diverse levels of proficiency to comment and participate in discourse, motivate students’ growth and development.
One of the most efficient techniques of encouraging students to interact, display and acquire knowledge is through question practices since they require identifying reasons for the problem in question, finding evidence, analyzing motives, and deductive skills. Thus, the teacher should encourage students to ask questions and respond increasing students’ involvement and comprehension of the problem (Dantoio and Beisenherz, 2001, p. 57).
In addition, providing more time to think, accepting relevant call-outs to give the students equal opportunities to express their opinion, resorting to praising for good efforts, and making adjustments when the answer is not completely correct, assists the process of learning. Through asking and answering questions, learners “demonstrate sufficient understanding to organize and arrange material mentally” (Knowles, Holton, and Swanson, 2005, p. 39). It should be stressed that the teacher’s patience allows learners “with limited English proficiency, minority students, lower-achieving students, and females” to provide better feedback as they might need more time to understand the problem (Alexander and Winne, 2006, p. 774)
To create educational opportunities for diverse learners, a careful investigation of the learners’ cultural, social, and family backgrounds should be made. Attending to diversity presents a crucial factor since different learners may approach learning differently paying attention to self-control and independent approach or preferring collaboration. Learners from poor social backgrounds, reserved and confined students should be mildly encouraged to participate in the discourses since there’s a slight opportunity that these students would volunteer. In this respect, it is important to display respect for learners’ varied talents, skills, talents, interests, and perspectives (Alexander and Winne, 2006, p. 768).
As far as adult learners are concerned, they require more motivation and new techniques for learning (Knowles, Holton, and Swanson, 2005, p. 38). The underlying principle of adult learning is that contrary to conventional techniques, adult learning is based on the student’s previous experience as well as the teacher’s knowledge (Knowles, Holton, and Swanson, 2005, p. 39). To remove barriers that inhibit adult learning abandoning the teacher’s authoritative attitude is of immense importance.
Moreover, “adults’ orientation to learning is self-centered; therefore, the appropriate units for organizing adult learning are life situations that are based on the analysis of experience, not subjects” (Knowles, Holton, and Swanson, 2005, p. 40). One more important aspect of learning is acquiring skills to conduct research that develops learners’ abilities to search for relevant and reliable sources, to analyze, evaluate, judge, value the available information, provide innovative ideas and make conclusions (Lester, 2004, p. 6).
It should be pointed out that despite implemented improvements in the educational programs, they still require modification since several academic theories of learning have been “derived from the study of learning by children” and do not correspond to the proficiency of adult students (Knowles, Holton, and Swanson, 2005, p. 34). Furthermore, notwithstanding the vast amount of research on students’ diversity of learning approaches, the common practices continue to be applied to all students in educational institutions regardless of their level of proficiency. According to Friedman, to extend educational opportunities and to facilitate learning, a common framework of innovative research, findings and knowledge should be implemented to provide reliable and verifiable data for all institutions, which would be beneficial for both students and scientists (Abowitz and Roberts, 2007, p. 477).
However, “an evident fallacy of Friedman’s metaphor of the flat world” is the assumption that everyone can benefit from web-located resources as “some communities in the developing world still lack basic resources for learning and education” (Abowitz and Roberts, 2007, p. 478). On the other hand, it should be stressed that educational programs have been altered to achieve better students’ comprehension of knowledge. Thus, supplying learners with understanding-oriented instructions allows achieving better feedback and learners’ involvement in the process of learning.
All things considered, it should be stressed that learning is a long and difficult process that requires the application of different techniques and principles for diverse learners.
References
Abowitz, K., & Roberts, J. (2007). The fallacies of flatness: Thomas Friedman’s the world is flat. Journal of Philosophy in Education, 41(3), 471–481.
Alexander, P. A., & Winne, P. H. (2006). Handbook of educational psychology. New York: Routledge.
Dantoio, M., & Beisenherz, P. (2001). Learning to question, questioning to learn: Developing effective teacher questioning practices. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Knowles, M. S., Holton, E. F., & Swanson, R. A. (2005). The adult learner (6th ed.). New York, NY: Elsevier Publishing.
Lester, J. D. (2004). Writing research papers (11th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.