“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.

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.

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.

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.

ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN

PARTICIPANT PROFILE :

MARK MORLEY-FLETCHER

About Me:

I’m 30 years old and work for the Civil Service as an analyst; my background is originally in Theoretical Physics.  I live in London and I‘m a keen musician in my spare time, but I also spend a reasonable amount of time playing sport and other general outdoor activities.

My Experience of Anything Could Happen:

I didn’t come on the on the Anything Could Happen course with a clearly defined goal in mind – rather, I was keen to see what new things I could learn about myself in an unfamiliar learning environment; I was sure the course would throw up some interesting development opportunities that I was previously unaware of.  I also thought that a weekend of outdoor activities in Snowdonia would be enjoyable in its own right.

As such, I didn’t have any firm expectations of the course.  I guessed it would probably involve various team building activities along with some more ‘challenging’ outdoor activities along the lines of abseiling, but I wasn’t sure how it would all be tied together or how learning points would be drawn out of it.  This was another reason I was interested in the course as I was keen to find this out.

The course packed an awful lot into two days, but some of the main activities included: guiding blindfolded partners; hunting foam animals scattered throughout the town; creating art out of slate; abseiling and climbing; round table debates; creating codes on a chessboard; and building a bridge across a lake.

Each of these activities threw up interesting points, with some of the most revealing being the ones which I had initially expected to be less interesting.  For example, I didn’t feel particularly enthused by the idea of slate art, but after being left to get on with it on my own for a while I found myself really getting into it – it ended up being one of the most enjoyable activities for me.

There was definitely a consistent theme to this and it helped me realise how much I can get out of things I wouldn’t usually consider doing once I actually start to engage with them.  I also found it very interesting to compare how I approached those less familiar things with how I approached more familiar activities – I think I learned a lot about myself from the similarities and differences in approach.

Overall though, the biggest learning experience for me was the time devoted to group review after all the activities.  In the past, I’ve not been particularly inspired by discussions after various development courses; they’ve tended to identify one or two “key” points (usually identified by the leader before the exercise even started) and then moved on.  In this case the discussions were longer and I realised that the first few ‘obvious’ learning points which came up were not always the most revealing.  Reflecting within the group rather than just individually led to a lot more ideas coming through.  Also, there was no “right answer“ for us to take away and in some cases, people got different insights from the same activity.  Overall, one of the few regrets I have about the weekend is that there weren’t more hours available in the day so that we could have spent longer on these sessions.

These in-depth reflection sessions were the biggest thing I took away from the course as I determined to think about what I can learn from different situations and experiences more frequently, and to spend longer doing it as well.  On top of this I’ve come away with some more specific insights into team work – both on how I go about it myself, and how other people’s approaches can affect things too.

Overall, it was a very enjoyable weekend, packed full of all sorts of different activities (to the point where it felt much longer than just two days) which has provided me with some very deep learning experiences.  I’d recommend it to anyone who’s keen to challenge and find out more about themselves – compared to many other development courses it really has the potential to give you some very individual and personal insights.  Be prepared to throw yourself into it though; since the outcomes and learning points aren’t fixed, what you get out of it will depend on what you put in.

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.