Planning their next move. Apprentices from a major telecommunications company plan an overnight trip on foot and by canoe in the Lake District to scout out locations for a walking tours company.
Come on in the water’s lovely! In a steep mountain river in North Wales, a participant realises he may not have done his wetsuit all the way up.
“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.
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]
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]
Snowdonia | October 2010 | PDS / O2
After a one day workshop introducing O2′s latest intake of apprentices to the Personal
Learning and Thinking Skills framework, we took them to Snowdonia for a week of personal development.
Abseiling, climbing, navigating, canoeing and pontoon building all provided material for discussion and a background for exploring the PLTS. Producing a substantial workbook with thoughts, reflections, questionnaires, photos and drawings, the apprentices used the last morning to draw it all into a six month action plan and returned to the workplace keen to try out their new learning.
“An extremely valuable way to learn vital lessons about ourselves and each other”
“I didn’t expect it to be so much fun!”
McDonald’s have a very systematic approach to business, with managers using flowcharts, lists and logbooks to make decisions and record information. However beyond the shift manager level they need staff who can think outside of these constraints.
Totem devised a one-day leadership potential assessment which produces a report on each candidate, based on their performance during a series of challenging outdoor tasks. The participant’s made a film, cooked burgers on an open fire, discovered hidden parts of the New Forest and built themselves a crane!
“Very enjoyable and informative, the analysis and feedback were very helpful”
The government recently changed the nation-wide Apprenticeship framework, removing the Key Skills and replacing them with the Personal Learning and Thinking Skills.
Having worked with Totem on delivering the Key Skills through outdoor learning, PDS asked us to reframe the outdoor learning we had in place around the PLTS. Using the QCA specification as a starting point, we developed a loose-leaf workbook which helps apprentices capture experiential learning through discussion and reflection and turn it into a useful action plan.
Network Rail’s apprentices spend their first year living on a Naval base in shared accommodation so getting to know each other and team work is essential. Like last year, Call of the Wild created a two day self discovery course designed to allow the apprentices get to know themselves and each other and Totem staff went along to help.
Using experiential learning and facilitated session, the apprentices learnt about DISC, Tuckman, Perception and took part in a series of challenges, all cumulating in the SuperTeams event.
Unsurprisingly, we are rather fond of Totems here. The diversity of methods, colours and crafts that go into making these anthromorphic representations is amazing.
This one, from the Howies website is one of our recent favourites, a skateboard with totemic stylings. It was created by 45rpm for Howies Deckades collection.
These are my two remaining business cards.
I started with a pack of 500 twelve months ago, so I’m reckoning I’ve met a lot of interesting people since then. Some of those cards sit forlorn in people’s desks and folders, many are probably in the bin but one or two have created a connection. A chance to work with someone who shares our ideals or who can benefit from our services. Someone we can help or who can help us. Or maybe, as a friend put it, I’m just a networking slut?
In this age of email, LinkedIn, Facebook and Plaxo, it’s amazing that business cards even have a place any more. But that little 8×5 card has a physical presence that is a lot more difficult to ignore than a transient stream of electrons.
I’d better go order some more…
Like many people I know, I keep all my notes in a single notebook. I prefer a hardback A4 book, lots of space to write/draw and pretty robust.
I started a new book (left-most black) the day I started Totem. Almost exactly 12 months to the day I filled it completely. So with a new year comes a new book.
I always start each day by writing the date and where I am. Places I have worked this year include Cherhill (the office), Cheltenham, Llanberis, Forest of Dean, Southwick, Brixham, Duchy College, Bradford-upon-Avon and Transylvania.
The first book above was from when I was at Marlborough College and contains 18 months worth of notes and the second, held together with masking tape, from Boulder Adventures amazingly contains nearly 5 years of notes.
I’m looking forward to filling my new one.
At Totem we believe that outdoor training is a tool, not
an end in its own right.
A carpenter might sometimes reach for a chisel while making a chair, but it’s not the only tool he uses. In the same way, for trainers and training managers, only sometimes the outdoors is the right tool for the job.
We work with training organisations to deliver their learning aims, or parts of them, using the outdoors as the vehicle. We are proud to be a small cog in a larger training machine.
Unlike traditional adventure education, with us it’s not always climbing vertiginous mountains and paddling raging rivers. We frequently make use of the near-doors, that natural area just beyond the classroom where lessons can still be learnt but it’s still pretty comfortable, and a cup of tea isn’t far away. Adventure is, after all, a state of mind.
Our trainers use a mix of taught theory and ‘learning by doing’ (experiential) challenges. This allows the academic learning to be reinforced by practical examples of working with others under exciting conditions.
We have a pretty strong set of core values here at Totem, centered around how we feel a company should be run and how we should treat our clients and staff. The paraphrased version is “Do unto others what you would have others do unto you”.
The longer version is now on our Core Values page if you are interested.
We don't change organisations, we change people. People change organisations.
