In the last month we’ve had three groups of apprentices through our Personal Learning and Thinking Skills course, challenging themselves and thinking hard about learning in the beautiful surroundings of Snowdonia. With more groups taking on the course in the coming months we asked one cohort to come up with some advice for those that followed in their footsteps. With no prompting from our Development Guides, this is what they produced;
[Click for full size]
“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]
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.
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!
Review is a key tool for almost all forms of learning. Whether you call it an “after action report” or a “personal reflection”, we must review our actions if we are to learn from them.
Choosing the right form of review is a skilled task, more art than science. Here are 10 questions to ask yourself before you dive into your next review
Sometimes it’s important to review as a group, sometimes it’s best to let the action speak for itself. The individual’s reflection over time may be enough.
Even if we want to review the action, are the participants in a state where it will be useful? Could they do with more time to process what just happened or are they bursting to share their thoughts?
Even if we feel ready to review what just happened, is it worth leaving until we have eaten or are less tired, or do we need to capture the learning now?
Sometimes it helps to be at the scene of the action, sometimes some distance is useful. Is this setting inspirational, will it help anchor the learning. Are there distractions and are they useful?
Do we need the whole group here? Should we split into smaller groups? Do some people need to reflect on their own? With or without leaders/trainers?
Should I contribute? Facilitate? Sit quietly? Be absent? Observe?
Options include: Group discussion, written reports, structured notes, questionnaires, presentations, personal conversations, pictures, slideshows.
Do I have access to exercises, models, pictures and theories that might help explain my points, or help others to make theirs?
Is the review of interest to anyone other than the participants? Will they want a chance to revisit the review again later? Will they be building on this review?
Sometimes taking notes is useful, what about video? Is there a formal system in place for reflection that needs to be completed?
Why do it?Is “Because it’s there” a good enough reason to do something? Do you want to do it to become wealthier, to be more secure, to learn something or just to get to the top?
You need to work out what you resources you need, you need to work out a rough schedule as well. You also need to make sure you’re up to the task and have the right team around you.
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.
Have you ever been lost? In the hills? In the city? Underwater? In your own mind?
Jamie Neal has. Christopher Columbus has. Macaulay Culkin has.
We’d love to hear your story, comment below or mail me.
This 2002 obituary for Goran Kropp, the Swedish adventurer and mountain
eer contains this passage which describes how he prepared himself for the unexpected.
“While doing his national service in a Swedish infantry regiment, he trained for Alpine climbing expeditions by sleeping in a gravel pit. His tough, self-imposed programme included setting his alarm clock at random: if he woke at 3am he would walk 30km in full combat gear; if he woke at 6am, he would walk 60km. “I wanted to get used to living with the unexpected,” he said.”
The rest of the obituary further emphasises how dedicated this man was to both adventure and minimal impact techniques.
“Kropp aimed to tackle each expedition “in harmony with nature”, without support and leaving no trace of his passing. “It is important for me to leave nothing behind me on a mountain,” he said.”
You can read the rest of the obituary on the Telegraph website.
Photo from MountainZone.com.
We don't change organisations, we change people. People change organisations.
