Learning Through Doing

Experiential learning for students

Children are increasingly pressured by the demands of education. As our knowledge as humans grows, the information imparted in schools increased in quantity as well as intensity, and there is a great deal of information to process and add to their personal knowledge base.

However, not much is being done to make them efficient in practical terms. One reason for this is that it is difficult to create a syllabus for soft skills like leadership or communication, and near impossible to measure performance in a way that can be represented indisputably as "examination result".

However, when these children go out into the world as individuals in a professional capacity, they will have strong references for information specific to their work at their fingertips, and much of their personal success will depend on their ability to use, exchange and present their information or work smoothly with other individuals to accomplish professional challenges.

Our education system currently does not do much to empower children as individuals who can utilize various skills like communication, responsible leadership, team working, strategic planning, etc to perform at high levels of efficiency and interpersonal harmony. Such skills are also invaluable in developing an attractive personality, interacting with desirable effect with grown-ups in positions of authority (parents, teachers, etc), understanding and owning responsibility for personal choices and actions.

Experiential Learning as a targeted module for school children is a relatively new concept. The idea is for students to analyse their own behaviour in specific situations and to understand its effects on their performance toward the task involved. Various developmental games that are designed to challenge abilities in a variety of soft skills are used to generate behaviour data, which is accessible to the whole group and can be discussed to identify areas in their personality that require refining.

Activities can range from simple games to challenging physical achievements, depending on the objectives of the programme.

Discussions happen in groups in the presence of a facilitator to highlight the process and keep conversations on track. Facilitators can also steer discussions to bring focus on specific issues that need focus, which may have been identified at the planning of the programme, or in the beginning, through participant's perceived requirements and desired outcomes.

Advantages these programmes present over the traditional means of addressing such issues in the classroom include:

1. The learnings that emerge from these discussions are essentially the observations and conclusions of the students, and are thus more likely to be remembered as solutions they discovered through their own experience.
2. Being in a new situation means that all participants are equally unfamiliar with the proceedings and on the same level.
3. The unfamiliar structure also means that participants have no "pre-formatted" approaches toward finding solutions and are more conscious of the processes they choose to use in their efforts.
4. The game like nature of the activities is highly enjoyable and engaging and assists in retention of their learnings for longer periods of time.
5. The game like feel of the activities also means that any criticism of behaviour that might come up in the group is less likely to result in a perceived lack of self-worth and a suggestion is more likely to be accepted as an option to try out rather than a "correction" of a personal fault that would encourage emotional resistance.
6. The unfamiliar nature of the whole programme also gives participants an experience of quickly adapting into an unfamiliar situation and assuming responsibility.
7. Experiential Learning also provides an indirect boost to self-esteem, confidence levels, openness of ideas and comfort with group interaction.

I recommend such programmes to be organized over the period of two and a half days under ideal circumstances to allow the establishment of the learning cycle firmly in their approach to challenges, but a fairly decent programme with noticeable results can still be achieved within one full day (8-10 hours). Shorter sessions to increase awareness are a possibility, but learnings are often not "tested" enough for participants to apply them in real life, without conscious guidance.