Powerful Techniques for Teaching Adults

Three Things to Remember About Teaching Powerfully

There is nothing that kills your authority, and that stops a responsible use of power, than a teacher neglecting to model whatever it is that they're asking learners to do. So if you want to create a powerful environment—one in which learners are ready to take risks in acquiring skills and knowledge that will change their lives—you must first make sure you model for them your own engagement with these risky activities.

Part of students becoming empowered is their realizing that they have resources and allies who are there to support them and broaden their existing repertoire of skills and practices. This means that any teacher who thinks student empowerment is important needs to intervene in class to make sure that ALL students contribute, and all are potential resources for each other's development. You can't assume that students will act with inclusive goodwill towards each other. Often those who are the most privileged outside the classroom will automatically reproduce their privilege inside it, unless you prevent this happening. Through exercises such as Circle of Voices, Chalk Talk, the Critical Incident Questionnaire, and Circular Response, you can insist that students follow conversational protocols that give everyone a chance to be involved early on in the class.

If you are trying to get students to dig into dominant ideology, and to challenge their long accepted ways of thinking and acting, watch out that you don't make the basic mistake of working too fast and furiously. Teachers fired by a desire to encourage their students to push back against dominant ideology sometimes plow ahead in an eagerness to get to the ‘good' stuff of critiquing Capitalism, White Supremacy, Patriarchy, Heterosexism, and Ableism. But for many students this will probably be the first time they have been invited into a serious and sustained challenge to accepted ideas. Ignoring students' hesitations, their fearfulness, and the weight of previous socialization can be disastrous. After all, this kind of learning incurs the shock of psychic and cultural turbulence. Moving immediately to considering how dominant ideology lives within and constrains them, or how it causes them to perpetuate all the ‘isms' they may be philosophically against, is something you need to prepare learners for.