When you’re teaching in an adult literacy and education classroom, not every instructional strategy is going to resonate with every student—they are all different types of learners. In fact, tutors and teachers of adults are often working with a demographic that might have had negative experiences with school in the past. Finding new ways to teach and reinforce material can create positive learning experiences that resonate with adults and lead to gains.
Janet Sodell
What’s the key to a positive and effective learning experience? Confidence, said Janet Sodell, teacher and tutor trainer at The READ Center in Richmond, VA. Much of an adult educator’s job is boosting self-esteem, and the ability to read follows, she said.
As a seasoned instructor with years under her belt, Sodell, who has also led multiple ProLiteracy Teacher Training Plus sessions, has found ways to do this. One of the best ways, she said, is to use games in the classroom that put students into a teaching position.
When she puts a student in the hot seat to guess a word unknown to them, their peers become responsible for giving useful hints—putting them in a teaching roll— to guide the guesser toward the right answer.
Sodell said activities like this build retention, confidence, and even soft skills. It forces students to go outside of their comfort zone and stand behind their hints and how they choose to guide their peers to the right answer.
“[All the students] want to talk at once, and then the person in the hot seat can’t hear anything. So, they’re learning to share space with other people, and they begin to see that everybody has a different way of describing something,” she said. “It really validates the people who think a little differently when their information or their way of describing something helps that student get the right answer.”
“It really validates the people who think a little differently.”
Sodell has a whole array of games she uses. Each one requires students to work together to help each other get the right answer, whether it’s determining which to, two, or too correctly completes a sentence; ordering fractions from smallest to largest, without speaking; or playing a board game as they read a story that leads to debate and sharing ideas and accepting others’ ideas.
“We are all tired of worksheets and going over the same topic in the same way,” Sodell said. “I started [using games] just because I needed to cover the material in a different way.”
Adding games into instruction not only reinforces what is being taught in class but also hits on so much more than just reading and the four components, Sodell said.
Learn more at the ProLiteracy Conference
Sodell is coming to the ProLiteracy Conference on Adult Education to present more on this topic in a workshop titled “Using Games and Activities to Elevate Students to Teachers.”
She will lead participants through abbreviated versions of the games and lead a discussion about the pros and cons her students shared. She will also share lessons learned to help others who want to use this workshop to springboard their own initiative to implement this tactic into their instruction.
Sodell’s workshop is just one of the practical and relevant presentations planned for our conference October 6–9 in Baltimore, MD. Learn more about our conference on our web page.