A Teaching Handbook for Wiccans and Pagans (10 page)

A high-level screening tool that many people use is a basic informative email that gives potential students background information on you—and your group, path, or tradition, if applicable—and details what you will be covering in class and what you expect from students. If students don't like something you talk about in your email, or if they don't think they'd fit in, they usually either ask clarifying questions or break off the conversation and start looking elsewhere, thus screening themselves.

The informative email that my husband and I send to people who contact us about possibly joining our group started out simply as a description of our group, tradition, and teaching style, but as people asked questions, we added more and more information to avoid answering the same question over and over again, and now the email has gotten quite long. We jokingly refer to it as “the scare-off email” because it has helped more than one person decide that our group was not for them. For example, it states up front that we practice skyclad after initiation (the training leading up to initiation is done clothed so people can get to know each other before they get naked together), and that there are no exceptions. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable; it certainly made me feel that way when I was new. Some stop talking to us right there, while others ask questions, and still others come to class even though they're nervous about it (and invariably get over it once they know everyone and are comfortable). Disclosing things like this up front gives students who might be bothered by it or who simply don't want to do it a chance to bow out before they've invested too much time.

References and Google

You can—and should—check out your potential students by word of mouth and online. Talk to their past teachers, if any, and ask around in the community to see if anyone knows them and would give them a reference. You can also ask potential students to provide references themselves. Don't go as far as cyber-stalking them, poring over their Facebook pages and tweets, but at least Google them and see if any red flags come up, and encourage them to do the same to find out more about you. (Remember, though, that several people might have the same name as your potential student, so it's possible that the information you turn up when you Google someone's name is about someone else.)

Weeder Classes

If you've got the time and resources, it can be very helpful to run a beginning “weeder” class or seminar to find students who might be good candidates for longer-term or more in-depth study with you. I think of it like Journalism 101 at my university, which was an entry-level class designed to be difficult. The class gave students a chance to show their stuff, and people who couldn't pass it didn't move on to more in-depth study or major in the subject. Melanie Henry's group has a fairly in-depth thirteen-week beginner class from which they draw new students for their coven. However, a weeder class doesn't have to be difficult or run as long as thirteen weeks, and it can be much less formal. My husband and I ran a Pagan arts and crafts class at the local bookstore for a few months both as a community service and as a way to meet and work with potential students.

Questionnaires

Questionnaires can be used alone or as a preliminary technique in conjunction with personal interviews. You can use them to whittle down a large group of potential students to just the ones you want to invite to your class or spend time interviewing. Questionnaires can be designed to give you very in-depth and personal information or simple, high-level information. They can also be less nerve-wracking for a potential student than an in-person interview, and of course they're much easier to administer online. Melanie Henry's group uses a questionnaire as a warm-up for personal interviews. “[Potential students] fill out a very long form, in which they tell us all their deepest secrets,” she told me, laughing. “We ask them a lot of questions in the interview because we would rather ask a bunch and not be surprised.”

Interviews

As you might have gathered, my husband and I—and a lot of the teachers and group leaders I know—use in-person interviews to screen students. In-person meetings are harder to organize and they take time, but you can get a lot more information than just using a questionnaire. You can ask follow-up questions in the moment and read body language—both very valuable when you're trying to find out if someone is a fit for you, and you for them. It's best to meet for interviews in a neutral public place rather than your own home, in case your interviewees turn out to be people you don't trust. Try to make your interviewees as comfortable as you can so you get answers that are less tainted by nervousness or the desire to impress you.

Like questionnaires, interviews can be fairly superficial or very comprehensive. Melanie Henry described the interview process her group uses:

We have a rather intensive interview process. We do our best to weed out the really difficult ones before they even get in the class. We've had some real wackos come to our class interviews. By the time you've gotten through an interview, if you are a difficult person, at least we know what kind of difficult person you are, by and large.

There are some sample questions in
Appendix A
that can be used in questionnaires or interviews or as a starting point for creating your questions.

[contents]

Chapter 4

Adult Learning Styles

Good teachers create a plan before they begin to teach, even if it's just a simple outline in their heads. But before you can plan what you're going to teach, whether it be for an informal session or something more structured, it's very helpful to have a basic understanding of how people learn, and specifically how adults learn. Knowing a little bit about how adults absorb information will help you plan a better, more effective learning experience, because you'll be able to work in activities that meet multiple learning goals and needs.

Learning Styles

There are several different theories about learning styles, or about how people get and assimilate information. Each one has its fans and its detractors. I am not going to make an argument about the scientific validity of any of them; there always seems to be controversy—or at least disagreement—about theories such as these. The important thing to me is that using the theories I'm going to describe below has worked for me in teaching Pagans, so I have found them very valuable. There are other valuable theories, too, and I encourage you to do a little research on your own to find the ones that resonate with you. I also encourage you to dig deeper into the theories I'm discussing here since this is just a very basic overview.

Learning Modes

Some adult-learning theories state that learners absorb information in three ways: visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. Learners use all three modes but are not equally strong in all three. They tend to have one that is especially useful for them.

Visual learners
need to see what they're learning. They like graphics, diagrams, and pictures. They tend to be good readers and remember what they see or read better than what they hear.

Auditory learners
need to hear what they are learning. They tend to be good speakers and like group discussion.

Kinesthetic learners
are physically oriented and hands-on. They learn best by doing.

If you take this into account when you are creating your class, you will make sure that your presentation includes a variety of visual, spoken, and hands-on elements. This might sound obvious, but think for a minute: have you ever been to a long lecture that had no interactive portions? In the West, this is the “default” way to teach. One person in the room might enjoy it immensely, but you can bet that others are bored to tears or, worse yet, confused. Or did you ever have a teacher plop a project down in front of you and expect you to figure it out by doing it, with no auditory or visual instruction? For auditory and possibly visual learners, this is just as bad as a lecture-only class. If you balance your teaching between visual, auditory, and kinesthetic experiences, you have a better chance of your students absorbing and retaining what you teach them.

David Kolb

David Kolb divided learners into four types, based on a four-stage model of how he believed people learn. Each of the four stages in the model forms the basis for the one following it. First is concrete experience (CE), which is any learning experience; followed by reflective observation (RO), which means reflecting on the concrete experience; followed by abstract conceptualization (AC), creating a theory or model of what happened in the concrete experience; followed by active experimentation (AE), when you test the new theory. Active experimentation then leads back to concrete experience.

Each of Kolb's learning styles combines traits from two of the phases of the learning model:

Divergers (CE/RO):
Divergers learn best by intuition and observation.

Assimilators (AC/RO):
Assimilators learn best when focusing on sound theories and ideas.

Convergers (AC/AE):
Convergers learn best when focusing on practical uses for what they're learning.

Accommodators (CE/AE):
Accommodators learn best by trial and error and hands-on experience.

Following Kolb's model, you might create a learning experience that allows for all four of the phases in order to reach multiple learners, and/or you might take all four of the learning styles into account. For example, instead of just talking about how a person might call the quarters, you might provide some basic information about the quarters (CE), break the students into groups to discuss what you told them (RO), have each group come up with its own system for calling the quarters (AC), and then have them try out their system to see if it works (AE). This could appeal to all four of Kolb's types of learners, but another option is to plan the class from the point of view of the learner; that is, make sure that your class meets the needs of each group by including elements of observation where students can make intuitive leaps (divergers), theory (assimilators), practical application (convergers), and hands-on experience (accommodators).

Bloom's Taxonomy

Benjamin Bloom's initial work identified three areas of learning: knowledge (also called the cognitive domain), skills (the psychomotor domain), and attitude (the affective domain). These are often referred to as “the KSAs” (for knowledge, skills, and attitude). Bloom took this work further and divided the knowledge and skills areas into six sub-areas of learning. These sub-areas, taken together, are called Bloom's Taxonomy. They are:

Knowledge:
The ability to recall, repeat, and define information

Comprehension:
The ability to describe and explain information

Application:
The ability to demonstrate or use knowledge, and transfer it to new situations

Analysis:
The ability to question or analyze knowledge

Synthesis:
The ability to make something new from different pieces of knowledge

Evaluation:
The ability to assess information

As with Kolb's model, if you are taking Bloom's Taxonomy into account when creating your teaching plan, you'll make sure to include experiences that cover all six learning areas. It will be important not only to present information but give your students opportunities to use the knowledge in several of the taxonomy areas. For example, let's say you're teaching a class on using the sign of the moon in magic. You might present some basic information and ask questions to ensure that students are understanding you (knowledge); have students explain their own experience using the moon's sign (comprehension and synthesis); have them write a spell using the moon's sign (application and synthesis); and have them determine if their spell worked, and why or why not (analysis and evaluation).

Note that the example I've given covers some of the same areas as the example for Kolb's model, and both include experiences that are visual, auditory, or kinesthetic.

Teaching Adults vs. Teaching Children

Its important to understand how people learn, but as teachers of Paganism it's also important to know specifically how
adults
learn. If teachers don't understand how adults learn, or if they try to teach adults like they would teach children, teachers risk turning off, boring, talking down to, confusing, or alienating their students—or all of the above. Worse yet, lacking knowledge about how adults learn, first-time teachers of adults sometimes fall back on teaching examples or experiences from their own pasts. But whatever technique your middle-school English teacher used to teach you to diagram sentences is not going to help you teach adults how to use an athame. (Trust me; I used to be a middle-school English teacher.) Neither will imitating your college history professor's lecture style to teach about tarot trumps, even though your professor was teaching adults (more or less).

So how
do
you teach adults, then, and how do adults learn best? Many educators of adults have found the work of Malcolm Knowles to be invaluable in differentiating between teaching adults and teaching children.

Malcolm Knowles and His Six Assumptions

Malcolm Knowles is the granddaddy of andragogy (the art of teaching adults, as opposed to pedagogy, the art of teaching children), and his work is used widely by people who teach or train adults. Knowles puts forth six “assumptions” about how adults learn, or how they want to learn. All of them can be applied to teaching Paganism. This is my extremely simplified synopsis of Knowles's assumptions. There is much more in-depth information available than what I'm presenting here in Knowles's publications, including his book
The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species
.

Need to know.
Adults feel the need to know
why
they are learning something. Although children will accept that what they're learning is the basis for learning something else, like learning their letters is the basis of learning to read, adults want to fully understand why learning something is worth their time.

Self-concept.
Unlike children, who look to adults for direction, adults perceive themselves as self-directed and want to be treated accordingly.

Foundation, or the learner's experience.
Adults come to learning with a lifetime of experiences, unlike children, who haven't built up as many experiences yet. Adults see new information through the filter of these experiences, which means each student in a group will perceive and think about a topic differently. This experience can be very useful for the teacher to mine when trying to find the best way to communicate with a student, but it also presents challenges because it means that no two students are alike, and a one-size-fits-all teaching format isn't likely to work.

Readiness to learn.
Whereas children are taught information when the adults around them think they are ready to learn it, adults seek out new information for themselves when they are ready for it or need it. Therefore it's important when teaching adults to make sure the information presented is relevant to their lives and useful to them immediately.

Orientation.
Children are often taught in a way that is “content centered,” meaning that the information being taught is the focal point of the lesson. Adults, on the other hand, are problem-, task-, or life-centered and want to learn things that will help them perform everyday tasks or can be applied to solve problems.

Motivation.
Children often learn in order to please their teachers or families; they are externally motivated by rewards, like good grades. Adults, however, are more internally motivated learners. They are influenced to learn by things like self-esteem and personal satisfaction more than they are by rewards.

Other Factors in Teaching Adults

Age.
Many of us—especially those of us who are over thirty-five—would like to think that age isn't a factor in teaching adults, but it is. Generally speaking, older students can be less flexible than younger students in learning situations, in part because of their longer life experience. They've “been there,” and they know—or think they know—what they want and need. They also know what has worked for them in the past and what hasn't, so they tend to be more inclined to go with what they know. Younger students tend to have fewer preconceived notions, and they can be more willing to “go with the flow.” This does not mean that one group is better than the other! The important thing to remember is that people at different ages will have different expectations and needs, and you might need to ensure that the material you are teaching meets the goals of people in several different phases of their lives. And although it might be generally true that age makes a difference, there are many exceptions to the rule, so the trick is to take age/life phase into account without making prejudgments based on it.

Shared goals.
When you are teaching children or teens, you can't necessarily assume that your students have the same goals that you have for the class you are teaching. This is largely because most children and teens have little say in what they are taught (and many of them would rather be anywhere but in class). Adults, however, as Knowles points out, usually self-select to take a class for specific reasons or to learn something to help them solve a specific problem. Their goals tend to be more in line with the teacher's goals. This factor, added to Knowles's assumptions about adult students being self-directed and internally motivated, indicates that it's important to treat adult learners as if they are on the “same side” as the teacher. You are more like peers working together to ensure learning than a guru speaking from on high to his or her acolytes or a professor lecturing a bunch of bored, hung-over freshmen.

The main point to take away from Knowles's assumptions and the other factors is both simple and complicated: adults like to be treated like, well,
adults
. In my experience, all of Knowles's concepts are accurate portrayals of adult learners, but I've found the idea of the learner's experience to be most important—or at least it's the concept that I need to remind myself about most often when teaching Pagans. Ever been in a class or corporate training where, before beginning to teach, the trainer goes around the room to find out everyone's names and why they are taking the class? It might seem like a huge waste of time, but trainers do it for a good reason: so they can tailor the class to the life experience of the students.

Since Pagan paths are so experiential, with personal gnosis often a strong factor, I've found that the history, filters, prior knowledge, and set of assumptions that the learners bring into the class with them weigh more heavily on how the student perceives the class than they do when I teach something less personal, like proofreading. I once knew a teacher who said that to learn a particular Wiccan tradition, I had to “un-learn” what I had already learned about Wicca from other sources. The teacher wasn't taking into account that it
was
my prior eclectic learning and personal journey that had brought me to the tradition in the first place. What this teacher should have said was that I might need to shift what I had learned before to fit into the context of the new tradition. If I used to call the quarters starting in the east, maybe now I'd need to learn to do it in the north, but I'd still be calling the quarters. This approach would have incorporated my previous knowledge rather than discounted it.