The User Driven Classroom

Invista classrooms come in all shapes and sizes. Some are intimate gatherings of potential leaders in which the groundwork is laid for anticipated succession plans and promotions. Others are built from students who will meet inside of them for the first time and together tackle challenging lessons that hold the key to long term success within chosen fields. In spite of this variation, a constant is that the Invista student is always an adult learner and, in the field of adult learning, Invista instructors are nimble experts able to present user driven experiences designed to appreciate the challenges and strengths unique to the adult classroom.

Adult learners typically share some fundamental preferences within the classroom.

They:

·         Like to know why they’re learning

Adult learners are most successful when they understand that the time, energy, and effort they’re being asked to invest is meaningful. They like to have goals fully disclosed and success defined from the start.

·         Like to be deferred to

Adult learners like to have their talents recognized and their temperaments appreciated. Adult learners buy into tasks and join communities that welcome them without limits or lists of expectations. 

·         Like to feel safe

Adult learners come to the classroom with backpacks packed full of baggage. When adult classrooms are nonthreatening environments, in which success comes to students early, anxieties are efficiently disarmed.

·         Like to be engaged

Adult learners are most likely to take in ideas successfully when they are delivered in the language they feel most comfortable in. Digital, dynamic, and multimedia presentations approach topics in a student’s leisure tongue making them not only easy to digest but also innately nonthreatening.

Presenting to adult learners with a mindfulness of these preferences reshapes an entire classroom by transforming objectives and lesson plans. Rather than beginning a course with a list of skills they must face, scale, and achieve, students are approached as visitors instructors must anticipate and guide through an experience. Lessons are constructed to invite students into challenges with initial presentations that expect the typical preferences of an adult learner, exercises that maintain a student’s engagement, and final assessments that appreciate a concept’s eventual real life presentation. Adult learners leave user driven classrooms with complex understandings of interconnected concepts, rather than isolated skills. By growing literate critical thinkers, user driven adult classrooms deliver employers more than a group of employees who can now complete a given task, and instead return workgroups with the skills required to best complete any task.