College of Pension Actuaries

If you will be working with adult learners of English, start by assessing their needs. Many English as a Second Language students know what they want to learn. At the beginning their needs will most likely be “survival” phrases (i.e. Where is the bathroom? How much does it cost? Traffic sign reading.). Then they will need basic functional English for filling out job applications, getting medical care, and signing their child up for school.

Ask your students to identify what they want to learn by using any of the following methods or a combination of them.

1. Have the students look through their textbook or picture dictionary and place Post It Notes on five pages with the information they think is most important.
2. Have students check off things they want to learn on a pictorial list depicting different activities (grocery shopping, reading a note from school, filling out a driver’s license application, job applications, etc).
3. Show students a pictorial strip illustrating three reasons why Antonio wants to learn English; then brainstorm with the class and substitute their reasons for learning English.

This gives the students a voice in their instruction and makes the content relevant to their lives. It also gives you a chance to evaluate what skills your students have already and what they need to strengthen.

Once you know what your students hope to achieve, use the principles of adult learning. Adults are problem solvers, self-directed, and disciplined. They already know how to think and they know how to learn new things. They will want to know why something needs to be learned and that it is applicable to their life.

If you need to write procedures for your organization, you may be tempted to start writing immediately, especially if the project is complex. Wait! Take time up front to select a methodology for your procedures writing. The right methodology can simplify a policies and procedures project and ensure a more useful and maintainable end product. As consultants with over 10 years of experience in writing procedures and creating procedures manuals, we have learned what makes a procedures writing methodology efficient and effective. Here are our top five tips for selecting a methodology for writing procedures.

Tip 1: The Right Methodology Helps You See the Big Picture

The right methodology helps you identify and understand at a high level the processes you need to document. Once you have a high-level understanding of processes, you can build a framework for your project and identify the steps needed to fill in the framework. Then, you will have an easier time planning your schedule and estimating time and resource requirements.

Tip 2: Changes Happen – A Good Methodology Simplifies Updates

Changes are inevitable in any organization, especially complex organizations. If you are going through the effort to write procedures, you will want to make sure that those procedures can be updated easily as changes occur in your organization. A methodology that simplifies change management is critical. We have found that organizing procedures by process is a very effective way to simplify change management. In general, high-level processes do not change as quickly as their implementation does (i.e., the procedures). For this reason, if you organize your manual by process, most updates should not require major reorganization of the manual. When reviewing methodologies, be sure to consider how a particular methodology would simplify or complicate updates.