How People Learn

The primary focus of a small group is to encourage spiritual formation and Christ-like growth through community, so understanding how people learn can be a key factor in leading people to greater spiritual growth. To help your group attain a more effective growth atmosphere, here are three things you should know about how people learn.

• Motivation to Learn – It seems most adults seek out learning experiences in order to cope with specific life-changing events such as, marriage, a new job, a promotion, lose of income, retiring, losing a loved one, moving to a new city. With this, the more life change events an adult encounters, the more likely he or she is to seek out learning opportunities. Just as stress increases as life-change events accumulate, the motivation to cope with change through engagement in a learning experience increases. This is why we encourage ice-breaker questions at the beginning of small group meetings. You can us this as a means of gauging your group’s motivation to learn and finding how many life change events are taking place.
• Curriculum Design - Adult learners tend to be less interested in and enthused by survey courses. They tend to prefer single topic courses that focus heavily on the application of the concept to relevant problems. Programs need to be designed to accept viewpoints from people in different life stages and with different value sets. A concept needs to be anchored or explained from more than one value set and appeal to more than one developmental life stage. The concept of multi-generations and stages becomes one of our greatest challenges in keeping our small group topics relevant and whereby leaders should be evaluating spiritual maturity of group members on an ongoing basis to evaluate future direction.
• Learning Environment - The learning environment must be physically, mentally, and spiritually comfortable. The home setting seems to create the ideal environment for comfort with group members that are already familiar and have current relationships with others. As well, areas outside the church tend to yield an environment that allows group members to bring a great deal of life experience into the learning and growth equation when they feel comfortable and at ease. A group that is just starting out may want to choose a coffee house or restaurant setting as common ground to break the ice and develop relationships.

These points were developed from writings found in an article entitled Innovation Abstracts, By Ron and Susan Zemke.