Adults, unlike children, return to school when changes in their way of life require it. A promotion, the need to have a better salary, change of work, and even update your knowledge; These are the things that make adults go back to school.
The key ingredients to succeed in adult education is skill, prior knowledge and motivation.
Skill
Skill is the ability with which each of us was born and that allows us to acquire new knowledge. The ability varies among individuals, some have abilities for some thing and others for another. Then, the learning ability is the intellectual capacity that each one of us possesses and that greatly influences our possibilities of learning something.
Prior knowledge
The skill or fitness is intimately linked to what we already know and this in turn has a great relationship with the success of any teaching-learning process.
Motivation
The motivation seems to be affected by three ingredients: courage, confidence and state of mind. The more value we assign something the more motivated we feel to learn more of that. If we value that we are seen as knowledgeable about music then obviously we are going to try to learn as much as we can about music. The more we value something the higher is our motivation to learn about that.
Henry Ford once said “if you think you can or if you think you can not, you’re right”. All of us are aware of our abilities but having confidence can help us to achieve higher goals, confidence is greatly affected by your state of mind/mood.
Learning new skills in the right environment will help with your confidence levels and mood.