STUDY GROUP OUTLINE

Part Two: The Principles in Action-Across Cultures and Around the World
Chapter 10 - Immediacy: Teaching What Is Really Useful

1. Why does the author say that being stopped by soldiers in El Salvador who demanded that she surrender her passport was a "large part of the educational needs assessment?" (pg 125) How did this experience enable her to develop a training program that had "immediacy" for the learners?
   
2. Ms. Vella divided her planning into two parts: the plan for the planning, and the plan based on the Seven Steps of Planning. (pgs 125-126) What did this approach allow her and her co-planners to do?
   
3. 'There is a strange paradox I have observed: "The more structure, the greater chance of spontaneity." (pg 126) When are students more participative in your classroom: when your lesson is organized, logical, supported by visual and audio aids, and by student-to-student interaction OR when your lesson is unprepared or unclear even to you, when students are unable to see or talk with other students due to the configuration of desks or tables, or when the ideas come only from the teacher?
   
4. Are you a "backseat driver" (pgs 127-128) in your classroom? Have you ever taught
   someone else to drive a car—a child, friend, non-English-speaking student? What emotions went through your head . . . and mouth . . . during that time? Is it fair to compare teaching an individual person to drive a car with teaching a classroom full of students to speak English or understand fractions?
   
5. "It was vital for me, not to understand everything, but to have the right questions ... I have always held that my motto, as teacher, must be: Question the answers!" (pg 128) What does this statement mean to you? Do you "question the answers?" What kind of answers do you question?
   
6. Ms. Vella recommends dancing as one other favorite educational practice for adult
   education. (pg 130) Do you include playtime - time for the brain to rest - as part of your lesson planning? What movement activities have you done with students in your classroom? Have you ever set grammar or spelling rules to music? Do you and your students clap the rhythm of a sentence with hands ...knees ... feet?
   
7. "Comprehensive participation" (pg 130) means that learners and leaders must be willing to commit themselves in advance to participation in the entire length of the program, not just part of it. When a student drops out of your adult education class does it affect the way remaining students interact with each other? If all adult education students paid a fee for attending classes now offered free of charge do you think more students would complete a semester or year, enabling them to reach their long-term goals more quickly?
   
8. Ms. Vella believes that nearness to the work site is advantageous in adult education because it ensures that the "locus of control is shared by learners." (pg 132) Many adult education classes are held on-site at business and industry locations. Is this what she means by work site? What is the "locus of control" and how can learners share it?
9. Armed soldiers held Ms. Vella and her students at gunpoint for 30 minutes, then forced them to leave the farm immediately. More than 10 years passed before she was able to talk or write about that event because her fear and pain was still so vivid. She concludes that story with the comment: "the materials you use must be close enough to be immediate, distant enough to be safe!" (pg 138) What does she mean?

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