There are no particular pedagogical or didactic challenges in teaching healthy senior citizens that teachers have not met and had to deal with when teaching other age groups.
On the other hand, there are many national myths, prejudices and personal assumptions about the elderly and the ageing process.
As a teacher, it is important to be aware of your assumptions about the elderly and the ageing process and base your approach and understanding of the elderly as students on factual science about this target group and the ageing process.
During 1970s and until the end of the 1990s, professionals tried to establish and develop a special elderly teaching pedagogical approach in Denmark of. To make it a specialty to teach older people. An institute for the elderly was even established.
The idea dropped and the institute today focuses on qualifying the pedagogical and didactic approach to the elderly with neurological challenges. Especially older people with dementia challenges.
In studies and articles focusing on the learning capacity and potential of the elderly, all too often the normal elderly are mixed with the situation and the challenges neurologically affected elderly face. And all too often, the older group is in different researches compared with younger ones without taking into account the different living conditions of younger/middle-aged target groups and older people. Therefore, too many challenges can be attributed and noted by senior citizens as being; Normal expected neurological decay through aging.
However, when it is important to make some specific general comments on teaching seniors, this is mainly due to 2 areas where a typical group consisting of senior learners differs from younger student groups.
- Their learning prerequisites
- Their learning approaches.
The majority of certain learning profiles in a random learning group of senior students will often be very different from what the teacher can meet and must prepare for compared to other younger audiences.
The 9 areas we would like to highlight are:
- Knowledge on ageing regarding retention and cognitive abilities
- Memory retention
- Understanding different learning processes
- Repeating
- Patience
- Simple steps
- Active listening
- Empathetic approach
- Feed back
