Inside Out

“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.

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.

After our last Anything Can Happen course we asked Mark, one of the participants, to write about his experience on the course. Anything Could Happen is such an unusual course with such a different methodology that it can be difficult for people to see what it’s all about. We hoped that by getting one of the participants to tell their story, it might help others to see what they might get out of it.

He did a fantastic job of describing his experiences, which we’ve presented below. There is also a PDF available for download if you want to print it out and give it to someone who would be interested.

Read More »

We don’t change organisations, we change people. People change organisations.

Nobody knows your organisation like you do. You know all its quirks and what works for you. All of your staff for a start. They all bring something to your team and those somethings combine to produce your success.

But just imagine for one second that each person brought a little bit more. A small change in their behaviour that leads to a small improvement in their output. Now imagine all of those small improvements adding up and you can easily imagine the change to your organisation.

Now imagine, if each of those small changes in their behaviour inspired someone else to change their behaviour. It’s a bit like dominoes and the change to your organisation increases rapidly.

At Totem we help people make those changes. By utilising a combination of outdoor challenge supported by behavioural theory we run programmes that are innovative and adventurous. Oh, and fun, because if people aren’t happy, they aren’t learning.