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layout: post
title: How to teach preservationists how to teach
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Education is so important to historic preservation but who teaches preservationists how to teach? Most professional or volunteer preservationist advocate have no formal training in education or training. Instead, I think I'm not alone in relying on an improvisational, seat-of-the-pants approach based largely on my own personal experiences of what I think works well or does not work well for me.

## How can we teach preservationists how to teach?

If we are going to open a school for teaching preservation, we need to know how to teach! We are starting to collect resources on teaching for adults and trying to use the resources we are finding to put together an explanation of how we plan to approach the creation of new lessons for the Local Preservation School and how we might encourage others to use our resources to teach in their own communities.

Since there are few resources intended for historic preservation professionals to guide us, we decided to search a broader set of fields that often try to engage adult learners with formal and informal educational programs and resources, including materials intended for:

- Public health professionals
- Librarians

## Related Resources

- [Effective Adult Learning: A Toolkit for Teaching Adults (2012), Northwest Center for Public Health Practice, University of Washington School of Public Health](https://www.nwcphp.org/documents/training/Adult_Education_Toolkit.pdf) (PDF)
- [Best Practices for Designing LibGuides](http://bestof.libguides.com/bestpractices/)

Create first draft of post on teaching methods
Create first draft of post on teaching methods