Exploring effective teaching methods to engage students at various ages and stages of their career
I attended a tourism industry event recently called the Link BC Case Competition. It's an annual event held in Vancouver, BC, where local Tourism & Hospitality colleges and universities send a group of promising students to put their knowledge to the test. The students are given a case question (that no one had previously seen) at 7h00 on a Sunday morning, and given 5 hours to research and prepare a 12-minute presentation. I was asked to be a mentor to a group of students. One of my first impressions was the difference in ages in the students. Some were straight out of high school, and others were older and had clearly had some experience in the working world. I wondered how their age and experience in the working world would affect and impact their performance in this relatively stressful and collaborative environment. I was surprised that some of the younger students, with less work experience actually performed.. better! I set forth to research whether there was a studied correlation between age and performance, and how as an instructor, you might use different teaching methods if you had students of various ages and experience levels in your classroom.
According to Anderson & Thorpe in their article titled "Early interprofessional interactions: Does student age matter?", it seems like "younger students entering straight from school achieved more learning outcomes and were more positive about the learning than the older students".
Their study focused the need to consider age when bringing together large numbers of different professions for their first taste of interprofessional education. Although the aforementioned paper dealt with a population of health and social care professionals in the UK and specifically with students coming from various backgrounds, some of the learnings apply to learning in general. Some of the challenges faced include that more mature students fail to engage in the activities and therefore negatively affect the cohesion of the group. Techniques that the instructors used included working in cross-functional groups, in this case from various background (pharmacy, nursing, medical students, and undergraduates) allowing students to learn from each other.
The paper concluded that younger students with little experience in the realities of the course material at hand worked well as part of a cross-functional team and appreciated the value of the interprofessional team. The mature learners understood the relevance of working together with younger students and wished that these techniques existed when they were younger.
Hospitality & Tourism is a popular field and attracts young people straight from high school. BC has a number of colleges that offer excellent programs including a number of co-op programs that allow for on-the-job-training, however more mature students also enter this field choosing it for its lifestyle, and thus classrooms include students of different ages.
I conclude for researching this topic that mixed age classrooms are a reality of many classrooms today. As an instructor, I would encourage collaborative work and mix up younger and more mature students and encourage that they learn from each other, the younger students helping navigate through new technology and the older students sharing their experience with the work force.
According to Anderson & Thorpe in their article titled "Early interprofessional interactions: Does student age matter?", it seems like "younger students entering straight from school achieved more learning outcomes and were more positive about the learning than the older students".
Their study focused the need to consider age when bringing together large numbers of different professions for their first taste of interprofessional education. Although the aforementioned paper dealt with a population of health and social care professionals in the UK and specifically with students coming from various backgrounds, some of the learnings apply to learning in general. Some of the challenges faced include that more mature students fail to engage in the activities and therefore negatively affect the cohesion of the group. Techniques that the instructors used included working in cross-functional groups, in this case from various background (pharmacy, nursing, medical students, and undergraduates) allowing students to learn from each other.
The paper concluded that younger students with little experience in the realities of the course material at hand worked well as part of a cross-functional team and appreciated the value of the interprofessional team. The mature learners understood the relevance of working together with younger students and wished that these techniques existed when they were younger.
Hospitality & Tourism is a popular field and attracts young people straight from high school. BC has a number of colleges that offer excellent programs including a number of co-op programs that allow for on-the-job-training, however more mature students also enter this field choosing it for its lifestyle, and thus classrooms include students of different ages.
I conclude for researching this topic that mixed age classrooms are a reality of many classrooms today. As an instructor, I would encourage collaborative work and mix up younger and more mature students and encourage that they learn from each other, the younger students helping navigate through new technology and the older students sharing their experience with the work force.