Note – This series of blogposts are reflections I’m writing in the Executive Chief Learning Officer certification program I’m in at George Mason University. We are the initial participants. Stay tuned for final analysis of the program in June 2016.
My Philosophy
Have you ever heard of the PAEI (Philosophy of Adult Education Inventory)? I hadn’t until this past week. I’m actually in an Executive Chief Learning Officer certification program (graduate school credits provided) for the next six months at George Mason University.
This was one of our first tasks in Dr. Nada Dabbagh‘s course on learning strategy and technologies. Through the PAEI she wanted us to find out our adult learning philosophy. I didn’t realize that I actually had a philosophy until taking this, or perhaps hadn’t thought of it as something important to determine.
My scores weren’t all across the board, and I’m ok with that because I’ve long been someone that considers theories and associated approaches as tools in a broad toolkit of possibilities. Especially since I find that subscribing to one approach often proves me wrong immediately after making bold assumptions.
Apparently, I am first and foremost of the humanistic philosophy (97%) followed closely by progressive philosophy (96%). To me that means that they are about equal since it is always difficult to put our tendencies into a small Likert scale.
Still, both of these philosophies are concerned with the whole person – what they bring to the learning table and how and where they will apply it (e.g. in every aspect of life). Now that I’ve been alerted to my tendencies, I’ve got to decide if I’m going to build upon that or keep remaining open to all the possibilities that leveraging insights from each theory has to offer.
For now, it’s worth taking a couple of minutes to take the survey, if just to see the explanatory paragraphs describing the results.
