We frequently make use of music on our courses, to inspire, to calm, to motivate, to represent, to tell stories. It’s one of the tools for what the NLP community call state change.

Music can also change our perceptions of what we are looking at. Here is a great example of that, YouTube user Mscharosch has edited some BBC Life footage to Lux Æterna from Requiem For a Dream and the result is, well…..epic. It is worth putting on full screen and turning your sound up.

Epic Frog

“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.

An Experiential Learning Cycle

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 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.

We’ve had a number of odd situations on Totem courses.

We’ve had Mission Specialists from the Welsh Space Agency chasing members of the Ukrainian Warfare Department across the hills of Snowdonia.

We’ve had loyal Comrades of the People’s Liberated Taldovian State recovering gold from the bottom of the Cripsian Sea.

We’ve helped apprentices recover the parts of a top secret battery from across Dartmoor.

(However, unlike one of the organsations we work with, we haven’t, to date, had anyone arrested for  impersonating a member of the local CID.)

Yesterday, Lorna, (whose producing some great material at the moment) has come up with a team exercise that makes our situations look humdrum and everyday.

Read More »

A quick method for starting out a review (or reviving one that is stalling). Go around the room and ask people to tell the group all the verbs they have been doing today.

e.g.

Climbing, Canoeing, Swimming, Falling, Sliding, Catching, Carrying, Paddling, Shaking….

Alternatively, have them collect them on a flipchart, or white board.

I also find this useful in encouraging people to move from “task” to “process”, by guiding their thoughts towards the non-obvious verbs.

e.g.

Sharing, Arguing, Discussing, Leading, Learning, Helping, Supporting, Plotting, Scheming, etc

It’s a quick, lively, thought provoking exercise that can take on a life of it’s own!