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“Oh, you deal with teaching and learning methods in further education?” Conversations about the project ThinK (“Using Digital Media to Assess Generic Aspects of Teachers’ Professional Knowledge in Different Educational Contexts”) continually generate interested inquiries. The project is part of the WissenschaftsCampus [Science Campus] Tübingen and is being carried out by the German Institute for Adult Education - Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning (DIE) in Bonn and the Hector Institute for Translational Brain Research in Tübingen. The aim of the ThinK project is to obtain insight into the knowledge that teachers from the field of adult and continuing education have concerning teaching and learning methods.

Interest in teaching and learning methods for adult education has always been high, a fact also demonstrated by the high sales that publications in this field achieve and the many hits received by websites dedicated to the topic, such as wb-web. This is because teaching and learning methods are and remain an essential tool for teachers and trainers in seminars and courses relating to adult and continuing education and are, with good reason, regarded as a decisive element in participants’ learning success. When engaging with the issue on a practical level, a question that repeatedly arose during the ThinK project was “And – what is the best teaching and learning method?”. Frequently, teachers and trainers attributed the greatest effectiveness to group work.

Teaching and learning methods arise from a specific combination of task type (e.g. exercises) and social form (individual, partner, group work or plenary session). The difference, which is frequently confused, mixed-up or misunderstood, can be illustrated by two questions from Hilbert Meyer: Who works with whom? (=> social form). What actions (e.g. giving a talk or presentation, reproducing something) should be performed? (=> task type).

From a didactic perspective, there is no one best teaching and learning method that covers all possible learning locations, age groups, and teaching and learning aims. The suitability of use and the actual effectiveness of a teaching and learning method are determined by the teaching and learning aim that is being pursued. In the same way, there is no one best tool for a carpenter, but rather the appropriate use of a hammer, saw, lever, axe or file depends on the result towards which the carpenter is working. This does, of course, assume that the teaching and learning method, just like the tools of the tradesman, are mastered at the moment of use, i.e. have been practised.  

We will illustrate this by means of a specific example. As part of further training event for teachers in adult and continuing education, the common teaching and learning aim is that at the end of the training the participants are able to identify and distinguish between various teaching and learning methods. If the supervisor of the training were to choose group work as the social form within which the participants develop individual teaching and learning methods, the group work would have to be organised in such a way that the chances of an individual group member successfully learning would increase in line with the success of the other group members. Thus it would be possible to form small groups within the further training group and within these small groups allow the participants to develop different teaching and learning methods. Assuming the role of experts, the participants then introduce a teaching and learning method to each other within the small group (this approach is frequently referred to as a group puzzle). Two positive effects can arise from the application of this method: By explaining the recently learned content, the expert reinforces his or her knowledge. Due to being just a few learning steps ahead, he or she still clearly recalls possible learning challenges and bears them in mind when giving their explanations.

Using the social form of group work does for instance not make sense, if the nature of the given task or the teaching and learning aim would allow for the so-called “freeloader” phenomenon— i.e. individual group members let one or several other group members do the work. This can result not only in less learning success among the “freeloaders”, but also in frustration and loss of motivation on the part of the other group members. If you wish to keep to group work in the setting outlined above, but at the same time reduce the risk of freeloading and lower cognitive activation, you could, for example, assign pairs of experts: The first expert communicates the content in which they have developed expertise to the other group members, but deliberately inserts three errors into the explanations. The second expert has to identify these errors and correct them for the group or, if appropriate, provide additional details regarding other important aspects of the topic that may not have been mentioned.

It is clear that group work can take on very different forms that may or may not be conducive to the learning process, and so it is difficult to compare group work per se with individual work per se and establish which is the better or more effective social form for participants’ learning success. The educational researcher John Hattie has (however) summarised a large number of studies. His meta-study, which has been widely seized on in empirical teaching and learning research but also been the subject of varied criticism, suggests that collaborative learning in groups is more effective than individual learning (https://web.fhnw.ch/plattformen/hattie-wiki/begriffe/Kooperatives_vs._individuelles_Lernen).

However, in specific teaching and learning situations the effectiveness of a social form or teaching and learning method depends on situational factors that are not or cannot always be given due consideration in studies. It is also the responsibility of a discerning pedagogue, in their own specific situation, to be able to decide with good justification what the case is and what should be done. Or to quote Hans Tietgens, the doyen of German adult education research, the professionalism of an adult educator is evident from their ability “to apply conceptual knowledge which has a broad foundation and scientific depth in an appropriate manner in specific situations, or seen from the opposite perspective: to recognise, in these situations, what elements from this body of knowledge may be relevant.” (Tietgens, 1988)

Knowledge about teaching and learning methods and their effectiveness is most certainly part of this “applied conceptual knowledge”. However, thus far little is known on an empirical level about its use in methodical and didactic practice by teachers in adult and continuing education. For this reason, we in the junior research group project “Professional Competences of Continuing Educators” at the DIE are currently investigating which teaching and learning methods teachers/trainers frequently use. If you are also interested in knowing which teaching and learning methods are particularly “in” among your teacher and trainer colleagues at the moment, you can support us by answering this question, win a voucher (wb-web until the end of 2018) and in this way add to the insight concerning teaching and learning methods in adult and continuing education.  The main findings will be published at wb-web.

Since 2013 Dr. Annika Goeze has been head of the junior research group “Professional Competences of Continuing Educators at the German Institute for Adult Education - Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning (DIE) in Bonn. She has been Professor for Lifelong Learning at the Ruhr-University Bochum since April.

From April 2013 to June 2018 Christian Marx was a researcher at the German Institute for Adult Education - Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning (DIE) and a member of Annika Goeze’s junior research group. Since 2018 he has been a research associate at the Department of Adult Education/Further Education at the University of Tübingen’s Institute for Education.