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BSPH CTL Teaching Toolkit (Amy Pinkerton): All right. So hello and welcome to our 1st of the 2025 picnic Pd workshops. Today's session is the adult learner teaching and reaching the adult brain. If you haven't already, please take a look at all of our upcoming picnic Pd workshops for the summer, which thank you, Lauren, for posting in the chat.

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BSPH CTL Teaching Toolkit (Amy Pinkerton): and to those of you watching this recording, should you be able, you should be able to find other good recorded workshops on our Ctl. Teaching toolkit site. So now I'm going to pass it over to our speakers. Heather and Emily.

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Heather Schwitalla: Hi, everyone. Thanks for coming. I'm Heather Schwitala. I'm an instructional designer in the center for teaching and learning, and I work on continuing education projects, such as Moocs, massive open online courses and non-credit trainings.

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Emily Haagenson: And I'm Emily Hagenson. I'm also an instructional designer here at the Bsph Center for teaching and learning. I work with our academic courses and support faculty and tas at the school. So thank you now, specifically for joining us today to discuss adult learners and the ways we can teach and reach the adult brain.

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Emily Haagenson: As we design learning opportunities, we should always be keeping our audience in mind.

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Emily Haagenson: Today we hope to describe the motivations of adult learners and evaluate existing or potential activities in our courses to align with these motivations.

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Emily Haagenson: When we talk about adult learners, it's important to establish a common definition, but also acknowledge the degree of flexibility. Our adult learners may be barely 20 or middle age, but what they have in common is that they're balancing academically rigorous courses with other responsibilities. Career, community, general life.

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Emily Haagenson: How do we support this balancing act? How do we provide the scaffolds to keep them stable and encourage them to stay focused.

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Emily Haagenson: First, st let's start by taking a closer look at our students.

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Emily Haagenson: Bsph serves graduate students. So it's important to differentiate our understanding of their experience from general higher Ed, which includes predominantly undergrads.

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Emily Haagenson: More than 80% of our students at Bsph are what we'll call working age adults, mostly between 25 and 50. They're building careers through their learning, but more often than not their public health career and their personal life are very much underway.

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Heather Schwitalla: The same is true for those we are reaching through Moocs.

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Heather Schwitalla: Our learners are between 25, and 50 years old.

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Heather Schwitalla: as I'm sure you're well aware, from our late twenties to our early fifties, is peak parenting and career development years. So when educating adult learners, it's essential to design our learning experiences with flexibility and understanding for the other common activities taking place in this age, range.

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Emily Haagenson: In balancing their many adult roles. Roughly, half of our learners are pursuing a degree of Bsph part-time, and or from a distance.

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Heather Schwitalla: No surprise here. The same is true. In Moocs coursera learners are busy navigating competing adult responsibilities

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Heather Schwitalla: for both Bsph and Mooc learners. We see that our youngest adult students prefer in-person courses.

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Heather Schwitalla: However, as learners get older, the preference moves towards the flexibility of online learning

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Heather Schwitalla: anecdotally. This shift is likely a result of changing personal and social needs in different age brackets.

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Heather Schwitalla: So our adult learners are busy. They're balancing work life and their education

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Heather Schwitalla: in order for our courses to reach their brain. Amongst these many competing priorities we need to teach in a way that aligns with the way their brain learns.

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Heather Schwitalla: So how can we teach? Excuse me. So how can we teach in a way that reaches the adult brain?

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Heather Schwitalla: What do adult learners need?

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Heather Schwitalla: According to brain-based research? Adult learners need to feel that their learning is both purposeful and engaging

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Heather Schwitalla: in order to make use of existing memory pathways. Adult learners need educational activities that include connections between new content to their existing knowledge.

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Heather Schwitalla: They need opportunities for self-regulation.

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Heather Schwitalla: They need learning activities that evoke positive emotional connections to the content, and they need interpersonal connection.

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Heather Schwitalla: Now that we know what the adult learner needs, let's dive deeper into into some techniques with examples that can help us meet those needs.

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Heather Schwitalla: Our 1st recommendation recommended technique is that our learners need to us to explicitly make learning meaningful.

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Heather Schwitalla: We can do this by clearly communicating the purpose of the content.

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Heather Schwitalla: You can do this with specific objectives, or by drawing clear connections among assignments and resources

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Heather Schwitalla: when designing experiences for adults, it is more important to teach for application than to teach for mastery.

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Heather Schwitalla: Therefore it's important to highlight the impact of learning the content.

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Heather Schwitalla: One trick is to explain why you care.

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Heather Schwitalla: but also why learners should care

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Heather Schwitalla: to do. To do this, you could explain how this skill matters for their job, and also how it serves a greater purpose.

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Heather Schwitalla: emphasize how their professional practice will improve through the practical application of a topic, skill or resource.

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Heather Schwitalla: Then explain how the activity and concepts are meaningful, because they contribute to the bigger picture.

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Heather Schwitalla: For example, you could say for your job, you'll need to know how to write a memo for policymakers. Let's practice writing one about primary prevention.

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Heather Schwitalla: This matters because when you write an effective memo.

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Heather Schwitalla: this may affect change which contributes to your organization's mission of saving lives millions at a time.

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Heather Schwitalla: This is especially true when designing moocs, massive, open, online courses. Most learning by adults isn't goal directed or even planned.

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Heather Schwitalla: They've come to your course to solve a particular problem in their work or lives.

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Heather Schwitalla: We need to make it clear that the learning content will help them solve that problem.

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Heather Schwitalla: If we don't make it clear why they should care. They're unlikely to make it far in the course.

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Heather Schwitalla: Adult learners are not blank slates.

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Heather Schwitalla: They already have valuable professional, emotional, practical, and academic knowledge that we can use to help them learn more effectively

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Heather Schwitalla: the more past experiences that are available to draw on the more powerful meaning we can help them make.

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Heather Schwitalla: Therefore, the learning experiences we design for adults should create opportunities for them to connect what they're learning in the classroom to contexts that are familiar to them.

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Heather Schwitalla: Of course, as subject matter experts, we will share content that is new to our learners.

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Heather Schwitalla: however leveraging prior knowledge structures, encourages the use of existing neural networks, which in turn reduces the distance from point A to point B. For the learning brain.

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Heather Schwitalla: To do this we can strive to create flexible assignments that assess practical skill, application.

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Heather Schwitalla: active real world projects are ideal for adult learner engagement and retention. Because this type of activity applies brain-based learning strategies in particular emotional connection to the content and making use of existing memory patterns.

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Heather Schwitalla: The policy memo example from earlier can do double duty here.

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Heather Schwitalla: Practicing writing a memo not only makes learning meaningful, but for working adults. It can help them make the connection to familiar contexts.

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Heather Schwitalla: You can make this. You can make this activity more flexible by giving them a choice of format.

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Heather Schwitalla: Keep in mind that curious responses come from curious questions.

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Heather Schwitalla: elicit original thoughts to familiar situations by writing open-ended questions with multiple possible answers.

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Heather Schwitalla: One trick to help learners connect the new information to their existing knowledge

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Heather Schwitalla: is to see what you can learn from them while they're learning from you.

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Heather Schwitalla: In a lesson about primary prevention, you might pose the discussion prompt. Reflect on a time when you or someone, you know, benefited from a primary prevention measure.

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Heather Schwitalla: How did this experience impact your perspective of public health?

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Heather Schwitalla: Now, if you're interested in learning more about how to write effective prompts, you can watch the recording Foster belonging and online learning environments from last year's picnic Pd series, and I believe Lauren has been kind enough to pop that link in the chat chat for us.

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Heather Schwitalla: and finally use metaphors and analogies to build on existing neural pathways

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Heather Schwitalla: to explain the concept of primary prevention, you might say, primary prevention is like building a strong fence at the top of a cliff rather than placing an ambulance at the bottom

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Heather Schwitalla: by accessing the existing structure of the brain learners can create deeper understanding of new content, more quickly and with less mental energy.

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Heather Schwitalla: Are you feeling uncertain about how to apply this in your course?

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Heather Schwitalla: If so, let's engage with the with some examples in the next activity on the next slide here.

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Heather Schwitalla: So for this next activity, we recommend Lauren's going to pop a link in the chat. We do recommend using it on your computer. It looks a little better. It works a little better. But I've also got a QR code here where you can grab a tablet, grab a phone and scan that link. And we recommend, if you are looking on a phone, holding it the horizontal way rather than the vertical way. It will read a little bit better for this particular activity.

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Heather Schwitalla: So I'll give you about 2 min to complete this activity.

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Heather Schwitalla: and if you have any questions, the directions are in the activity. But if you do have any questions, if you find anything's unclear, feel free to raise your hand or just speak up.

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Heather Schwitalla: And also, once you're finished type into the chat, an answer to the question which one of the techniques that you're curious about trying in one of your courses. So you'll find several different techniques in this activity. Choose one that you're interested in trying out Pop, that in the chat.

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Heather Schwitalla: And the reason I'm doing this is it will help you connect the learning to your context. So what we were just asking you about, but it'll also simultaneously let me engage the progress for you all, because I can't see when people are staring off in the distance because they're done.

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Heather Schwitalla: or what. But I'll give you just some. I didn't queue up any music, so I'll just give you some silence to finish

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Heather Schwitalla: just another minute or so. Here.

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Heather Schwitalla: we're starting to get some answers in the chat.

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Heather Schwitalla: Okay, I do want to keep us to time. I've only seen one answer in the chat, but that might be because the rest of you are shy or getting your lunch, which is also a really important thing to be doing right now. So we're going to move along just to make sure we can get out of here on time. Please feel free to keep working, and also, please keep your device handy with for that QR code. We're going to be doing a similar type of activity a little bit later, and I don't want you to spend your time trying to find your phone again.

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Heather Schwitalla: all right, and I'm going to hand that off to Emily.

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Emily Haagenson: Thank you. Heather, as heather described integrating to familiar context, sets our learners up to feel invested. It also helps them feel engaged. Engagement integrates learning more purposely into existing neural networks, with the aim to access more neurons and diverse pathways in the brain.

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Emily Haagenson: Another way we can activate and hold learner attention is to engage multiple modes and multiple senses.

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Emily Haagenson: So as the teaching team creating content, you can provide a variety of access mechanisms for students to integrate learning in your course. This might be lectures, videos podcasts, readings, activities, discussions, projects.

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Emily Haagenson: When we use a wider variety of processes and skills to engage with content. We allow for more opportunities for connection and thereby retention of information.

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Emily Haagenson: Also, when we engage multiple senses, we're supporting a healthy, cognitive load, we aren't taxing just one area of the brain. We're instead using the entire neural network to integrate learning.

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Emily Haagenson: Take a moment to consider the activities in one of your courses.

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Emily Haagenson: Do you have a variety of access mechanisms to the material?

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Emily Haagenson: How might you be able to revise an existing activity in order to diversify the engagement opportunities with your content.

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Emily Haagenson: If you feel like you need help with this brainstorm, my instructional colleague, my instructional design colleagues, and I would love to support you in this capacity. So please reach out, and Lauren will put our information in the chat for you.

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Emily Haagenson: In addition to the multi-sensory content that you and the teaching team create, consider opportunities that you provide for learners, knowledge production, the real life applications in which your students will apply your content rely on a variety of skills.

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Emily Haagenson: Do the assignments in your course encourage the same practical diversity? And if not, could they.

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Emily Haagenson: for instance, this might mean that you have students produce a combination of knowledge checks, written assignments, peer review or feedback opportunities, a presentation with audio or visual components, an interactive activity like group work or a discussion.

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Emily Haagenson: Now, I know that Heather explained that we can activate learner attention with content that feels meaningful and familiar. And she's definitely right. But we can also engage learners attention with the unfamiliar, the new, the exciting, entertaining. This could be new topics.

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Emily Haagenson: It can also be new approaches to learning like simulations or case studies, decision matrices role play scenarios. You can also grab and hold attention with strong presentation skills.

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Emily Haagenson: And for more. On this we have another workshop coming up this summer on the engaged learner. And there are details about that in the chat.

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Emily Haagenson: A final attention grab engaging tactic. I want to encourage you to try is storytelling techniques.

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Emily Haagenson: using storytelling techniques in the delivery of content activates memory and emotional patterns.

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Emily Haagenson: Emotional arousal impacts, memory attention and higher order. Thinking stimuli is processed in our brains through the amygdala before the frontal lobe, meaning that before we process something logically, it passes through an emotional filter. In short, our emotions are not parceled away in a separate area of our brain.

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Emily Haagenson: All of our learning, all decision making is activated by emotional associations as instructors creating an emotional connection to learning effectively turns on the brain.

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Emily Haagenson: Now I know that sounds intimidating, or possibly out of your wheelhouse. You know many of you are scientists, but we can activate emotional arousal by employing storytelling techniques within our context.

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Emily Haagenson: For example, you might try highlighting relatable characters. They could be researchers or patients, even hypothetical individuals employ logical plot structures. As we deliver information with a natural beginning, middle ending.

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Emily Haagenson: you can use drama or cliffhangers, try asking questions or using pregnant pauses, invitations for prognosis or reflection. Try describing or providing visual aids to illustrate vivid settings and context, or using metaphors or parallels.

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Emily Haagenson: Let me show you in this example about primary prevention created by the Ctl. Video team and the faculty for the new indigenous Health Drph program. See what you notice and feel free to add any of your takeaways to the chat

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Emily Haagenson: in the great plains. There's a story of 3 sisters walking along a river.

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Emily Haagenson: and as they're walking along the river they see babies and young children in the water struggling to stay afloat.

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Emily Haagenson: The 1st sister jumps in and declares this is an emergency. It's a crisis. We need to get the babies out of the water right away.

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Emily Haagenson: The second sister thinks about that and says, No, we need to teach the babies how to swim so that they can survive while they're in the water.

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Emily Haagenson: The 3rd sister keeps walking upstream, and the other 2 sisters get angry with her and say, Where are you going? Why aren't you helping us? And she says, I'm going to find out who's putting these babies in the water, and I'm going to stop them.

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Emily Haagenson: And that's a wonderful traditional story about primary prevention.

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Emily Haagenson: Anything anyone noticed that you can add to the chat?

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Emily Haagenson: Dr. Warren is a masterful storyteller. His speaking cadence and emphasis, both soothes and activates our attention as listeners.

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Emily Haagenson: Part of us is emotionally invested in the welfare of these babies. The metaphorical story consists of a familiar structure of 3 sisters solving a problem coming to a satisfying conclusion. Because of these features, we're more likely to retain an understanding of what primary prevention is

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Emily Haagenson: than if we had merely read or heard the definition.

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Emily Haagenson: Our brains are wired for stories, and we want to see patterns and feel connected to our lives and our learning.

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Emily Haagenson: As we focus on engaging our busy adult learners, I want to also call us to remember that much of their learning happens when we aren't there to edutain them?

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Emily Haagenson: But didn't I say they were going to be busy and distracted? Yeah, I did so. How can we scaffold their learning, for when we're not present we need to set up our courses with the flexibility to encourage our learners to self-regulate self-regulation includes self-planning, self monitoring and self-reflection

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Emily Haagenson: so great, Emily. Self-regulation. It sounds like it's on them. Students are going to handle it. Yes, they are. But we can help by providing structures that encourage successful self-regulation.

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Emily Haagenson: Now the pinnacle of self-regulation is continually reflecting on and evaluating personal learning.

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Emily Haagenson: which questions it answers or doesn't where it can be applied, how it can be expanded upon continual reflection. Opportunities encourage learners to organize and store their learning, which leads to greater integration and retention.

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Emily Haagenson: Someday, some ways that we can provide. These opportunities include designing progressive assignments that build on themselves and leave room for feedback and reflection, encouraging personal reflection with self-assessment, strategies like rubrics or journal style prompts which may accompany formal assignments or be completion based or be unreviewed by you.

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Emily Haagenson: Finally using formative assessments, like knowledge checks can check in on whether learners are retaining important takeaways. And this recall also increases retention.

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Emily Haagenson: As an example, we're going to take a knowledge check on the primary prevention video that we just viewed again, you can scan the QR code if you'd like and do this on your phone or device. Lauren also is putting the link to the knowledge check in the chat.

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Emily Haagenson: There are just 2 questions. So I'll give you guys about 3 or 4 min to access and complete this knowledge check, quiz.

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Mary Munoz: He's in Wisconsin. He works for epic, which is my chart.

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Heather Schwitalla: I'm just going to pop in here to point out sometimes the link works a little funny. So if you got kind of a start the course option. Just make sure you're choosing the second option formative assessment examples. It worked fine for me when I tested it just now, for

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Heather Schwitalla: but in case somebody else's link worked a little differently.

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Emily Haagenson: Just a few more seconds

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Emily Haagenson: notice as you're taking the quiz. These questions are not about the details of the metaphor. There are no questions about Sister 2 versus sister 3. That's not the essential takeaway from the content the knowledge check establishes whether my learners, all of you, understood the foundational concepts. That's question one and can apply them. That's question 2. This check-in provides the learners and me with the confidence that we'll be able to apply the concepts

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Emily Haagenson: to higher level applications on future summative assessments.

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Emily Haagenson: I also used the feedback feature to either extend or redirect you based on your answer. So if you want to go back and get it wrong this time. You can kind of see what I was trying to do there, I hope. Stepping through a knowledge check was a good example of a self-regulation opportunity that you can help structure for your adult learners, for more on the value of knowledge checks. Join me and my brilliant colleague, Lauren

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Emily Haagenson: and Dana, on July 8, th for our developing learner workshop. She'll put the information in the chat

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Emily Haagenson: beyond the direct academic supports. We can tailor to our adult learners. Attending to experience is also essential as we facilitate learning, a primary component of our role as a teaching team is to provide a safe collaborative space that encourages thoughts and ideas to flourish. A supportive learning environment encourages learning.

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Emily Haagenson: This may look like fostering personal connections among learners through peer discussion or feedback, or by designing collaborative work or assignments.

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Emily Haagenson: encouraging peer-to-peer conversation builds connections to the course.

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Emily Haagenson: Much of our affective connection to learning is socio-emotional and reliant on interaction. We use social context to process and evaluate emotions attached to our ideas and decisions, and then tag and organize the associations. Researchers have concluded that this socio-emotional processing of information is essential for transferring knowledge from the classroom to the world

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Emily Haagenson: as instructors creating a positive emotional climate requires our intention on a personal and practical level. We can do this by modeling openness and taking ownership of our faults. We can reduce course-related anxiety by being clear and responsive, and we can remember that our learners are balancing priorities, and, when possible, be empathetic and flexible.

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Emily Haagenson: One of the best ways for us to connect and collaborate meaningfully with our students is through feedback.

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Emily Haagenson: That being said, consider carefully the strategies you use for giving feedback

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Emily Haagenson: clearly communicate feedback and communication plans to learners. So they know what to expect.

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Emily Haagenson: Comments like good job or minus 5 points aren't usually very helpful feedback. If you want to affirm learners make them feel seen by pointing out something specific. They do well, for example, I like the way you organized your conclusion.

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Emily Haagenson: If you want to correct them, one approach is to use a guiding question, how can you tie this information more clearly to your thesis?

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Emily Haagenson: Provide also timely feedback? There are strategies for doing this. I know it's hard if it seems impossible. Consider reapproaching the way you're giving feedback

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Emily Haagenson: some things that might help using a rubric will take time to create upfront. Yes, but it will ultimately save you time providing directions, clarifying expectations, grading, commenting, and justifying scores.

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Emily Haagenson: Try a comment bank to pull common feedback from, and then just tweak. You can also record your feedback verbally instead of writing it all out.

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Emily Haagenson: Consider giving collective feedback on common issues to a class through email or office hours, and also look for opportunities to delegate feedback to peer-to-peer feedback. The assessor often gets as much out of it as the student being assessed.

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Emily Haagenson: I know that sorry go back. I know that feedback is hard.

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Emily Haagenson: It's 1 of the most difficult components of a course to balance. Well.

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Emily Haagenson: ultimately, one of my favorite reminders about feedback is that people want to know you're sitting beside them in the process. And this can be as simple as when possible, using we instead of you in your suggestions.

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Emily Haagenson: We know that providing good feedback can and should be its own workshop session. So for today, we're going to close out our final takeaway for working with adults and then invite you to discuss useful feedback techniques or any other takeaways from today's session in the office hour following this workshop. We're eager for a chance to hear your ideas.

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Heather Schwitalla: All right. Disorganization and unclear expectations trigger a negative emotional attachment

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Heather Schwitalla: to the content, like disengagement and frustration. And of course, this is the last thing we want.

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Heather Schwitalla: Therefore our final brain-based teaching recommendation is to keep it clear and concise by optimizing for cognitive load.

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Heather Schwitalla: We want learner self-regulatory stamina directed towards the content and applications, not navigation.

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Heather Schwitalla: Specifically, we can achieve this by providing clear assignment directions attending to formatting

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Heather Schwitalla: design with the reader in mind. Think about what is the most important information here

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Heather Schwitalla: provide clear, open access to resources.

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Heather Schwitalla: This is this is especially important in Moocs, where learners don't have the advantage of an institution affiliation to get them behind a paywall

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Heather Schwitalla: and bonus tip here in your quest. To be concise, do not sacrifice clarity.

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Heather Schwitalla: For example, it is important to say or write the complete name of an acronym the 1st time it's used on in a page or in a lecture

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Heather Schwitalla: for more on this topic, check out the latest post in the Ctl. Blog. Say what you mean.

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Heather Schwitalla: I believe Lauren's about to pop this in the chat, the link in the chat, and this is hot off the presses. I added this 10 min before the session started, because it just got published. So you're the 1st to know

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Heather Schwitalla: alright. But in general, in order to be clear and concise, it may help to think of yourself as a facilitator. In addition to being a subject matter expert.

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Heather Schwitalla: you're not simply downloading knowledge banks.

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Heather Schwitalla: You're using your expertise to design a learning experience so that the learners can spend their energy on engaging with the content itself

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Heather Schwitalla: ironically. I could keep going on about this topic at length.

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Heather Schwitalla: So instead, I'll try to summarize it for you.

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Heather Schwitalla: Clear directions and activity design are essential for reaching the adult brain.

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Heather Schwitalla: Alright. That's it. We're just a little past time. But I'm gonna do a quick summary to wrap it all up here.

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Heather Schwitalla: We encourage you to try applying one of these techniques when planning your next learning activity. We've already seen a few good excellent ideas in the chat. Good is too low of bar here. We've already seen some excellent ideas in the chat. So to review our brain-based learning techniques for teaching to reach the adult brain are to make learning meaningful.

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Heather Schwitalla: connect, content to familiar contexts, engage a learner's attention.

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Heather Schwitalla: Prompt learners to reflect on learning.

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Heather Schwitalla: foster a collaborative, safe learning, environment, provide intentional and timely feedback.

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Heather Schwitalla: and keep it clear and concise.

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Heather Schwitalla: We now invite you to stick around and join us for office hours

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Heather Schwitalla: from now until one Pm. Emily and I will be here to answer any questions you may have on this topic.

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Heather Schwitalla: Not sure you have a question, but you're curious to learn more. Feel free to stay on and listen in to the clever questions and ideas others are bringing.

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Heather Schwitalla: So thank you so much for joining us to discover more about the adult learner teaching and reaching the adult brain.

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Heather Schwitalla: We hope to see you at another picnic Pd session soon.

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BSPH CTL Teaching Toolkit (Amy Pinkerton): All right, and then, before you leave, I also wanted to share some other resources from Ctl.

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BSPH CTL Teaching Toolkit (Amy Pinkerton): so 1st we have. If you're a ta, we have the teaching Assistantship Training course, which is an online self-paced course for Tas. It's specifically designed for Bsph Tas. But Tas across Hopkins could benefit from some of the modules, especially on teaching and learning, and how to support your faculty. So check that out. I also recommend checking out our other workshops and our

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BSPH CTL Teaching Toolkit (Amy Pinkerton): workshops on our on-demand videos, page and heather already mentioned our Ctl blog.

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BSPH CTL Teaching Toolkit (Amy Pinkerton): and then we also invite you before you go, and before we go into office hour the open office hours for this session. Please do complete this anonymous 2 min workshop evaluation survey. Your feedback is important to us, and we use this feedback to plan future workshops and sessions. So with that, I'll just leave this up on the screen for a moment as we go into the open Q. And a. And discussion. But thank you so much, and I will now stop the recording.