roneicherteachingpractice.weebly.com

“Hi! My name is Ron Eicher. I am majoring in adult education at Toccoa Falls College in the beautiful mountains of North Georgia. This portfolio represents my work and development as an adult educator during the course of a semester as a participant in a class called Adult Teaching Practice. The instructor for the class was Dr. Jarvis Crosby. The class had three stated goals as follows.” Through this adult education course students will be: 1) Developing skills, competencies, and points of view needed by professionals relating to the teaching of adults. 2) Learning to apply course material to improve thinking, problem solving, and decision making in the development of educational programs and trainings for adult learners. 3) Acquiring an interest in learning more relating to using reflective practice and participant observation in adult learning contexts.

“As a means of reaching these goals, class participants were required to complete several major assignments. These assignments included writing out one’s personal philosophy of adult education, discovering and writing about one’s personal teaching style, teaching other adult learners on two separate occasions (one in class involving their fellow- students and another outside of class to an adult group of the participant’s choice), the development of an electronic portfolio, and keeping an ongoing critical reflection journal that documented key insights gained each week. As a part of learning to be more critically reflective, participants submitted their assignments to be graded and then returned to them to be revised. In addition to these assignments, there were also periodic review quizzes. The class also participated in a participant observation exercise where we observed a professional adult educator in action.” ”This class serves as a capstone course for the adult education sequence here at Toccoa Falls College. As we look forward to putting the concepts we have learned to work in the “real world,” we pause first for a moment of critical reflection to survey the landscape that we have traveled. This portfolio contains a copy of each one of my revised assignments for the course. At the end you will find a concluding statement that identifies key lessons I have learned about teaching adults, personal areas of growth as an adult educator, self- identified areas of weakness, and areas of interest that I will continue pursuing in the future.”

The learner: I believe that every individual, including every adult learner, is immensely important because he or she has been created in God’s image. Consequently, people are worth my time. I will teach adults and teach them as well as I possibly can. The purpose of adult education: I wholeheartedly agree with the notion that education is an extremely powerful tool for both personal and societal development. It holds great potential for enriching life, for bringing justice, freedom, and equality, and for revealing and refining assumptions. However, it is both foolish and dangerous to expect that education will one day deliver answers for all of the problems humanity faces. “My adult education philosophy is built on the foundation of a Christian worldview and is both informed by and accountable to the meta-narrative of the Bible..."

» “I support collaborative efforts in learning and I tend to dislike testing. I encourage learner responsibility and focus the learning environment on the learners. I tend to plan learning activities that take into account the prior experiences of learners and that encourage them to relate new learning to prior experience. I believe that personal fulfillment is one of the central aims of education and as a result, I am sensitive to individual needs and desires. I invest emotionally in the learning process.”