A few years ago, I designed a course at TCU around experiential education. Designing, revising, redesigning, and more revising. I am now on my fourth iteration of the course, and besides the unpredictable whims of some of my community partners, I am starting to get my head around the experiences I want my students to have. An important aspect of the class is data collection and reflection strategies. The course is designed around Kolb’s Cycle of Experiential Learning as a framework, and the students are learning how to apply this framework to experiences they plan for their students.

Kolb’s Cycle of Experiential Learning is flexible and can be applied to many contexts. My students made the distinction early in the semester between experiences that happen to us (or that we put ourselves into) and experiences we plan for other other people. I had them write a paper reflecting on an experience from their lives when they learned an important life lesson. The students talked about a wide range of experiences, from becoming parents to being bullied to taking a wrong turn on a backcountry hike. In each of these experiences, students applied Kolb’s cycle to analyze what happened, how they have processed it looking back, what principles or lessons they learned from it, and how they applied this new information moving forward. I believe this framework can be an effective reflective tool for anyone wanting to think about the story of their life.

Another way to consider Kolb’s cycle is as a planning tool for teachers who want to create experiences for their students. Experiential learning from this perspective can be a lot of things. It can be in-depth, extended experiences like backpacking or study abroad. It can also be a learning activity on school property or a local park. And it can be everything in between. As a class, we are trying to investigate all of these experiences, and we are using Kolb’s cycle as a planning framework as my students plan everything from excursions to the school grounds or a neighborhood park to field trips to the zoo or living history museum to designing a school garden program.

When applied to this kind of experience, teachers much consider each phase of Kolb’s cycle as they plan the learning activity. Teachers must simultaneously consider the concrete experience (where they will go, what they will do), the abstract conceptualization (what are the concepts or principles to learn from this experience), the reflective observation (what are the tools, strategies, or methods used to focus attention on and connect the experience to the concepts), and the active experimentation (how can this experience be extended or connected to other contexts or experiences). When planning experiences like this for students, the reflective observation piece becomes the strategies your students apply to connect the experience to the concepts, whether it’s reflection or data collection. Strategies for observation, reflection, and/or data collection can take many forms: questions, checklists, bags for gathering items, forms, or GPS units and waypoints.

In order to provide some structure to how teachers (in this case, my students who will be teachers one day) plan these experiences, it helps to have a repertoire of strategies to choose from. At a macro level, they need to consider the overall structure of the activity. This includes grouping (will students all move together as a whole group, will they work in small teams, or will they do this activity individually) and directionality (will everyone be moving in the same direction, such as a nature hike, will they move from station to station in a sequenced or random order, or will they be allowed to wander autonomously within boundaries). Each of these decisions is important to consider as the teacher plans the experience, and it will influence how and what kind of observations, reflections, or data collection in which the students participate. When you consider different ways to pair grouping and directionality approaches, this provides a teacher with the following options for structuring the activity:

Whole group moving in the same direction
Whole group moving from station to station in order
Whole group moving from station to station in random order
Whole group moving autonomously within a boundary (not sure what this would actually look like, but I’ll leave it on the table)
Small groups moving in the same direction
Small groups moving from station to station in order (maybe with each group starting at a different station so you don’t get a bottleneck)
Small groups moving from station to station in random order (it helps to have more stations than groups to avoid bottleneck)
Small groups moving autonomously within a boundary
Individuals moving in the same direction (on a practical level, this may look the same as whole groups moving in the same direction)
Individuals moving from station to station in order (again, consider having them start at different stations)
Individuals moving from station to station in random order
Individuals moving autonomously within a boundary (this probably would look exactly like a whole group moving autonomously within a boundary)

This is a lot of options for a teacher, and it may be too much to think about. As we discussed these options as a class, we thought it might be easier to think about them as types of activities, and teachers could make decisions about grouping and directionality within the activity. The list of activities we came up with were

Scavenger hunts: students try to observe or collect examples within certain categories or from a list.
Treasure quests: students either use clues to get from station to station, or they collect clues at each station to solve a riddle/mystery/etc.
Geocaches: students use GPS data to navigate to stations, and they either look for or hide clues for the other groups.
Geo-based inquiries: students collect geospatial data in order to investigate a concept, phenomenon, or issue in their community.

Within these types of activities, teachers have some flexibility about how to pair grouping and directionality approaches. Not all grouping and directionality pairs will work for each type of activity, but teachers still have a lot of options for how to structure the activity. Without getting too caught up in the weeds, the bottom line is that these experiential learning templates provide a starting place for teachers who want to get their students out from behind their desks and into the outdoors. Over the next few blog posts, I will describe each of these activity types with some examples and possible tech to pair with the activity.

What has been your experience with experiential learning? Please share your experiences and ideas related to experiential learning or any of these activity types.

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Experiential Learning and Technology: The Basics