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Dimension III: Methods—How should it be taught?
Regardless of the content and dosage of marriage education offerings, critical decisions need to be made about how the content will be presented and learned. The process of learning is as crucial to positive outcomes as the content. Although our list is not exhaustive, we highlight three important method issues for marriage educators to consider: instructor, learning styles, and maintenance. Our comments on these method issues generally assume more traditional formats for marriage education.
Instructor. Just as important as who receives marriage education is who provides it. The more instructors are familiar with the particular issues participant individuals and couples face, the more credibility they will have. They will also be able to adapt and present curricular content to fit the lived experience of participants more effectively. For instance, disadvantaged, African American couples face daunting challenges to forming and sustaining marriages. Instructors who has “been there” and understands these complex barriers may be as important to the success of the program as its content. Hispanics now constitute the largest minority population in the United States. Unless marriage educators can tailor instruction and program materials in culturally sensitive ways, they will struggle to help an important population who experience serious stresses to their relationships. Gender can also be an important issue. Men, who generally are less enthusiastic about marriage education, at least to begin with, may be more responsive to the content of a program if delivered by a male-female team of co-instructors rather than just a female instructor. Similarly, a group of couples united by a particular faith may be served best by an educator who can communicate content within the culture and the language of their religious beliefs and practices.
In short, messages are enhanced or inhibited by messengers. If the general principle is that the more connected instructors are to their students the better the educational outcome is likely to be, then this suggests the need to recruit and train a more diverse corps of marriage educators in graduate programs in the behavioral sciences. A complimentary strategy would be to train existing front-line personnel in many different settings to deliver marriage education, including religious leaders, childbirth educators, and social workers, among others. Marriage educators to date have probably been most successful at working with religious leaders to offer marriage programs to their congregations, some of which serve lower-income and minority couples. People who simply have a passion for marriage education and are connected to the lived experiences of their students may be more important to the quality of the education than the advanced educational training of the instructor.
Learning Styles. Educational curricula differ in how much emphasis they place on cognitive versus experiential learning. Most marriage education programs include a variety of methods tailored to diverse learning styles such as didactic presentation of information, showing examples of a principle being taught (i.e., in a video), interactive discussion, role playing, and practicing new skills. The balance of methods requires careful consideration, however, including taking into account the needs and preferences of participants. Well-educated individuals and couples, who are the most likely to seek out marriage education on their own, are accustomed to more cognitive and didactic approaches. This approach may be less effective for individuals without extensive formal education; they may prefer more active, experiential learning methods. Similarly, some individuals from some cultures may be uncomfortable with public disclosure of personal lives and emotions, a method marriage educators commonly rely on to normalize issues and increase perspective. For others, however, externalizing their thoughts and emotions is a primary conduit for effective learning. Unfortunately, no iron rules exist for making these decisions. But one guiding principle is that these decision should be made by people who are well connected to typical participants and have a great deal of experience with them in educational settings, reprising the earlier point about the need for culturally sensitive instructors.
As sensitive and experienced educators tailor program methods to fit better the differing learning styles of distinctive groups, some marriage educators may become concerned about fidelity to tried-and-true programs. Fidelity is a legitimate issue; many program designers have thought hard about their interventions and refined content and method over time. Marriage educators often receive substantial training from program developers before being certified to teach in order to maintain fidelity to the program. However, we argue that fidelity needs to be measured with broader strokes. As program methods are altered to fit specific audiences, fidelity can be assessed with questions such as: Are the program goals and objectives congruent despite divergent teaching techniques? Are the essential, underlying principles clearly evident? Do participants end up with an equivalent set of knowledge, skills, and virtues? Fidelity is better conceptualized as replication of a foundation rather than copying every educational detail. Indeed, complete fidelity to methods that are ineffective at helping diverse groups learn foundational principles distorts the real meaning behind the term.
Maintenance. Although there is encouraging, initial evidence that marriage education helps couples build and sustain healthy relationships (Carroll & Doherty, 2003; Fagan, Patterson, & Rector, 2002; Gallagher, 2004), these effects may diminish over time. Given the steady stream of new stresses and challenges that virtually all couples face, diminishing effects are not surprising. For some time, marriage educators have speculated about the benefits of “booster” sessions at periodic intervals to reinforce learned ideas and behaviors, but few programs actually integrate this idea directly into their curricular process. Booster sessions may hold some promise. Cowan and Cowan (2000) effectively included standard booster sessions after the birth of a baby in their intervention to strengthen marriages during the transition to parenthood. Because attendance at follow-up sessions may be spotty, other ways to deliver booster curriculum deserve consideration. Some parenting educators have experimented with parenting newsletter intervention (Bogenschneider & Stone, 1997; Walker & Riley, 2001). Perhaps follow-up newsletters sent to program “graduates” periodically to reinforce program effects and encourage on-going maintenance activities could help maintain program gains over time. Marriage educators could consider employing electronic communications efficiently and creatively to follow-up with participants and reinforce learning.
Doherty and Carroll (2002) take the concept of booster sessions in a different and potent direction. They argue that nearly all marriage education fits a consumer model, with couples consuming education and then making use of it (or not) when they return home. Instead, Doherty and Carroll argue for a citizen model of marriage education in which couples who first consume education then give back to their communities by reaching out to help other couples in some fashion. Giving back could include a wide array of activities with different levels of personal investment, including mentoring other couples, becoming educators themselves, recruiting others to invest in marriage education, advocating in their communities for healthy marriages, and more. Doherty and Carroll argue that post-program involvement as a citizen of a community of healthy marriages helps to maintain and even increase educational effects at the same time it reaches out to encourage others to strengthen their marriages and builds a community of citizens who are intentional about their marriages.
Marriage educators need to give more attention to how they can help participants maintain program benefits. Intervention with effects that endure over time is a challenging goal, but accepting less than that clearly diminishes the value of marriage education. Indeed, it may be helpful for marriage educators to stretch the temporal horizon of their goal to think about multiple interventions across the life course. As one marriage educator suggested, we need regular marital inoculations, like yearly flu shots, against the changing seasons and contours of our lives. Helping marriage educators to think more systematically about the temporal and developmental context of their work is the topic of our next section.
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