Teaching methods and tools used in the adults’ education

Abstract

The conception concerning the adults' education, even also in defining the term, was always tributary to the social and individual needs during one period or another. Due to the rapid changes which have occurred on the labour market in the last decades, the adults' education has become an interest of the society, first due to the fact that the principle, „I learn today, I produce tomorrow”, has turned into „I learn today, I produce today”. These continuous changes have led to modifying the school position within the society, the school being forced to direct its attention not only upon the students but also upon the adults' education. In the adults' education, the main role is held by the capacity of learning achieved before, the type and reasons of learning and not the age as such. For the adults, school is correlated with work. The modernizing of the adults' educational activities has been made with practical-demonstrative methods which got a particular importance due to the use of the heuristics principles, the discovery of new ideas, significances or skills of major interest. The active participation in the one's own education represents the main course of these methods, this explains the strong extent they knew in the last years and the desire of those who organize courses for adults to know and use mainly such methods. The diversity of the methods used is very large, a part of them being used successfully also in the students' education, the most frequent being: debate, symposium, test and grids, examination, round-table, project, sharing of experience, industrial training, team-work, work with computer. The evaluation tools of the acquirements the adults gathered from their former experience, formally or informally, used successfully are: portfolio, teaching practice notebook, case study. The courses of training organized and the international projects carried on this theme in our school allowed us to apply successfully these methods and promulgate them.