Creating Courses for Adults: Design for Learning

Chapter OneAll About You

It has always seemed right to me to think of teaching as a craft. For any craft, one of the most important aspects is having the right tools and knowing how to use them to their best advantage. As a simple example, having high-quality masking tape makes it far easier to paint a house, but you need to know that it must be removed before the paint is completely dry if you don't want to leave marks (and bits of tape stuck to your walls). One of the differences between teaching and other crafts is that the main tools are the educators themselves. When you are teaching, your personality, your approach, and your values influence the form and outcomes of the process. This is such an important aspect of teaching that it makes ...