Teaching adults who already know their subject
Teaching adult subject experts involves building on their experience, connecting writing practice to their work and supporting confidence and independence. The trainer facilitates learning while making writing skills explicit.
Learners’ experience and needs
Learners assimilate new information better when it builds on their experience and reality than when it is imposed from outside. Learner-centred teaching integrates knowledge progressively without forcing sessions to fit preconceived content, giving learners tools to continue independently when properly guided. The approach became prominent in the 1980s and has roots in John Dewey’s, Carl Rogers’s and Jean Piaget’s work.
Prepared binders can encourage organisers to equate quantity with value, participants to rely on material when attention lapses, and trainers to use preparation as a shield when a session becomes difficult. Materials prepared before meeting a group may therefore support a passive, predetermined course rather than active learning responsive to participants’ needs.
Researchers, engineers and scientists can have substantial subject expertise alongside frustration with writing in English. Training should treat English as a tool rather than repeat the language-learning approach that has troubled them at school, and should develop responsibility and confidence.
The 70/20/10 learning-and-development model attributes approximately 70% of development to work experience, tasks and problem-solving, 20% to feedback and exposure to good or bad examples, and 10% to courses and reading.
Facilitation and trainer confidence
A facilitator develops responsibility and confidence by focusing on actual group needs, setting realistic objectives, encouraging exchange and feedback, and accepting a shift of power towards learners. This makes outcomes dependent on the group and supports lasting learning beyond the course.
The trainer needs relevant scientific-writing experience and comfort in the setting but need not regard themselves as an expert writer. Facilitators should have sufficient personal and relational security to trust learners’ ability to think and learn independently.
Adopting this approach takes time, and learners accustomed to directive teaching may initially feel short-changed when they realise they must supply the effort. They may also need time to accept compiling their own resources from their working environment rather than receiving a prepared binder. Trainers need to tolerate imperfect or unexpected group conclusions and resist letting learners complete an exercise only to replace their conclusions with an expert answer. Listening to individuals, sharing learning and following progress can be gratifying for trainers, while participants often leave with relevant, immediately applicable learning that is likely to remain anchored.
Adult-learning theories
Andragogy is the study of adult learning. Malcolm Knowles’s assumptions distinguish adult learners through self-direction, accumulated experience, readiness, internal motivation, problem-centred learning and orientation towards social-role tasks. Elements of action, project-based, experiential and self-directed learning can contribute to effective classes and workshops.
Action learning involves a group working on a real problem or project through experience, reflection and interaction, guided by a coach. Project-based learning similarly uses complex group questions or challenges, requires careful teacher planning, management and assessment, and is particularly suited to collaboration, communication and critical thinking; it is not limited to adults.
Kolb’s experiential-learning theory, published in 1984, describes learning by doing with reflection, through four stages.
- Concrete experience.
- Reflective observation.
- Abstract conceptualisation.
- Active experimentation.
Activities such as reading and homework can fit within those stages. Self-directed learning requires learners to initiate, select and assess learning activities themselves, and overlaps with self-study or autodidacticism.
Other adult-learning theories emphasise different aspects of learning and change.
- Piaget and cognitive structures: building mental maps through learning experiences.
- Behaviourism: conditioning behaviour through reinforcement.
- Choice or control theory: motivation based on what a person most wants at a particular time.
- Communities of practice: social processes in acquiring knowledge.
- Self-efficacy: belief in personal capabilities as an element of empowerment and constructive change.
Explicit instruction and the learner’s perspective
Scientific-writing instructors need to explain skills that editors apply implicitly: changing a passive sentence is insufficient without teaching the difference between active and passive constructions and when, why and how to change them. Teaching doctoral students, many of whom need a publishable manuscript to graduate, also requires expertise in journal content and style, including introductions, section flow, methods, statistical results and tables. Without that expertise an instructor can still help bachelor’s and master’s students with course papers but cannot effectively teach doctoral manuscript writing.
Patience and understanding matter because learners, particularly in the hard sciences, may not have an experienced editor’s language skills. Teaching should start from the learner’s perspective and accommodate busy professional adults who are experts in their own field, with encouragement and genuine belief in their capacity to learn.
Introducing too much too soon can obstruct learning statistics, particularly for learners who do not aspire to become statisticians. Technical categories such as univariate, bivariate and multivariable statistics can organise material around the discipline rather than an unfamiliar audience. Familiar organisation and explanations, with well-chosen clinical examples focused on practical application, can make an introductory statistics text accessible to clinicians and other nonspecialists.