Motivating adult learners

'First day back fog' lifted pretty early in the day today - it was a productive day and I was pretty content to be back, once I got there!

So to get back to the topic of motivating adult learners, some things happened today that motivated me to learn - a colleague and I discussed how we could learn more about teaching practice and how we could develop a community of interest around skills that enhance teaching and learning among teachers who are deliberately studying these things. We decided that while we would need some f2f meetings, we would also develop a web site so we could

• post interesting information for each other,
  
• have discussions,
• keep track of useful stuff we find, etc.
  

The motivator for me was that we were driving this - no one was making us do it, no one else would gain as much as we would from it, no one would join the group without a genuine interest in the subject matter, and it was fun to think about how we could be collecting information in a unique way - no idea is really new after all - we develop our ideas in an environment of input from so many other sources it amazes me when people take entire credit for thinking up 'new' stuff...yet if we don't do it we miss out on noticing a lot that we could be using. I guess that's what I see as a major purpose behind developing reflective practice habits
.
So we'll see where this leads.