Just look at how the mountains,
So very mighty be,
Sharp as razors at the top,
They span the land and sea,
But don’t forget that though,
Majestic spires capped with snow,
From each and every grain of sand did grow…
Seen on the side of a building off Hverfistgata in Reykjavik, Icleand.
“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.”
-Galileo Galilei
Experiential learning is the process of making meaning from direct experience.
Traditional education expects participants to learn about the topic from books, lectures, tutorials and worksheets.
Experiential education places them in situations that provide similar challenges to those they might face and evokes similar emotions, and that require similar skills and behaviours to overcome.
By using an adventurous environment such as the outdoors, we can provide a ‘laboratory’ in which facilitators can create challenging and demanding situations and in which apprentices can experiment with different behaviours, without that behaviour having a negative effect in the workplace.
This is one of many learning cycles that helps us to conceptualise and understand the complicated, messy process of learning. (For other cycles, see this great article by Roger Greenaway)
In order to learn through experience, it is not only necessary to ‘do something’. After we have performed an Action, three further things take place before that action alters how we act in the future.
First, we Reflect on the action we just took and the experience it generated. This is looking back and thinking about what happened and the feelings it generated, in ourselves and others and the effect it had on the environment we are in.
Then we conceptualise, that is, think about the reasons that it had those effects and understand those reasons. This leads to Learning.
Learning on its own is no use if we don’t then do anything with it, so we then have to Plan. This is about applying that learning next time you undertake that action and, importantly, similar actions in the future.
We all go round this cycle as we learn from experience, sometimes it takes a few seconds to complete a circuit and sometimes it might take us years. Typically, the more intense and complicated the experience, the longer it takes us to go round the cycle.
Different people favour different parts of the cycle, Peter Honey and Alan Mumford have a system for working out which area you prefer to spend your time in, which we occasionaly use on Totem courses.
There is of course, much more to experiential learning that these basic concepts, but they underlie much of what we do. Space to experiment, reflective practice and onward planning are at the core of Totem’s work.
We don’t often get involved with political issues here at Totem, preferring to solve the worlds issues by dealing with people one to one.
However, the Totem van is a Volkswagen and it appears that VW have been opposing environmental standards that we might prefer they supported.
As usual, Greenpeace have excelled in producing an amusing campaign to make people more aware of whats going on. It is worth taking 5 minutes to make yourself aware of this issue, and if you drive a VW, or feel strongly enough, sign up to let VW know that you’d like them to change their ways.
May the force be with you…
via Tim who works for us sometimes, thanks Tim!
We rarely use trust falls, they come with significant risk and, while they can be fun, the benefits aren’t really clear, except maybe as a metaphor for trust within a team. As usual Scott Adams has his own particular take on on them…
via Brian
Most courses evolve. They start as either a client brief, or from an idea by our staff and then move through various conversations and revisions, being changed even as they are being delivered. Looking through my file from a leadership course back in March, I found this piece of paper. It was the outcome of 30 minutes discussion between two of us and it became a very successful “Looking at Leadership” course that finished with the participants rowing the length of Windermere.
The fact that you can read it means the handwriting isn’t mine but I love the fact that, for one course at least, it is possible to pinpoint when all the ideas came together. [Click for a larger version]
Heard on Radio 4 this morning,
…any those are my thoughts on the matter, now go away and make your own mind up.
It struck me that these should be the final word of any training course.
We use review and reflection a lot at Totem. Experiential learning, which underpins everything we do is not just learning from doing, it’s learning from thinking about doing.
Have you got 5 minutes each day to help improve your life, across the board? This article suggests that it might be a good idea to find the time.
The best way to use the last five minutes of every day.
Via Lorna (again), photo from Slack12′s flickrstream under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Heard at a conference this weekend:
“…and of course you can make the task harder by giving a vaguer brief.”
No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! and No!
Giving a vague brief doesn’t make tasks harder, it makes them more frustrating. Participants spend more time looking to their facilitators to get clarification about what they need to do than looking at themselves or each other. It puts you in the position of power and takes away their ability to operate without your intervention.
By all means make your tasks harder, but at least have enough respect for your participants to make the briefs clear.
Photo from Martin Kingsley’s flickrstream under CC BY 2.0.
Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high!
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came,
and he pushed,
and they flew.
Totem have worked with PDS, a specialist apprenticeship consultancy, from pretty much the day we started. They are one of our favourite clients, they ‘get’ outdoor learning and consider it a key part of developing the whole apprentice.
They have just released a case study about the work we did with them and O2. It explains how O2 has proved that taking Key Skills development totally out of the classroom and into the open air can be a winning formula and why the Outdoor Programme we developed with PDS has become permanent feature of their apprenticeship programme.
O2 – Advanced apprenticeship in technology delivering key skills via the outdoors [PDF]
We don't change organisations, we change people. People change organisations.
