Experiential Learning is the process where students are engaged in authentic educational experiences centered around active inquiry, problem solving, and critical thinking. Students are empowered through choice and have real world impact through their reflective work.
Trends in Experiential Learning
Often times conversations about successful models of experiential learning point us to a sampling of creative high schools that have boldly sought to revamp their instructional practice. The benefits of this approach are multifold as students walk out of high school with real life skills, an authentic understanding of an inter-disciplinary world, and a purposeful lens of what all educational experiences make possible.
Starting Earlier
Often times K-8 schools are placed on the back burner when it comes to thinking about experiential learning, perhaps with an assumption that their art projects and field trips a few times a year will suffice. The mastery of Common Core standards, reading scores, assessments and evaluations are conversations that take center in K-8 domains.
While crafting paper snowflakes in winter and warm colored mosaics in fall, have great learning benefits, we cannot skim over a mindful reflection on what experiential learning has the potential to look like at the K-8 level, when students are naturally at their most fearless, creative, and inquisitive stages of learning. Experiential Learning has to go beyond pockets of hands-on opportunities for our younger population. A deliberation over what pedagogy would look like, if it were truly experiential is essential.
Be Brave!
Moving towards experiential learning requires courage from both administration and educators as you take on the bold initiative of blurring the lines that hold curriculum areas separately. Neatly demarcating English Language Arts from Math, Science, Art, Social Studies and the like is no longer necessary, in fact to be truly integrative is where successful learning experiences lie. Know that the standards will not be compromised in this mind shift.
Start Small, but Think Big
Start with one lesson, but know that this has the potential to become a whole unit of learning, and then over the next few years become the cornerstone of your practice. Take any one lesson and think about the potential it has in terms of growth to become truly experiential for your students.
An example of Life Science in Grade 1
One such example can be a lesson on animal adaptations in Grade 1. Resources like Mystery Science allow you to watch a video, do a hands on activity, and then a reflective worksheet as an extension.
To be truly experiential though, reevaluate the content standard and tap into its potential for inquiry and problem solving. If the objective of the lesson is that students learn how animals have different adaptations based on their environment, there are a myriad ways you can reconstruct the instructional experience.
Go beyond with a visit to your local Audubon or conservation wildlife sanctuary to have opportunities of bird watching. Have students craft paper roll binoculars if you don’t have access to real ones, and go bird watching in the school’s backyard. Check your local library for tool lending options, and you may get access to binoculars for free. Students can journal their findings, and then research, with guidance, different species of birds local to your geographical setting. Discuss with students what different types of beaks, feathers, and talons there are, and set a challenge to create bird feeders for different bird species. The problem here is not just to create a bird feeder, but to use the engineering design process to think about what structural design would be most efficient for which type of bird. Opportunities for collaboration, dividing work in terms of measuring, reading, drawing, writing, and presenting can be utilized to create a robust experiential learning experience. Getting a guest speaker who is an ornithologist, or a bioengineer, or a woodworker are all opportunities for exposure to different career pathways. Researching the types of bird food that works best, designing bird feeders for the trees or areas that would work best, creating a stable design, etc. all become essential components of this project-based learning opportunity.
Some Friendly Reminders:
Embrace failure. Yours and the students. There are times when the lesson will not go as planned; ride on those learning opportunities.
Let the students take the lead because they are naturally fearless and creative.
Provide them the predictability of your support and structure as they research, experience, and explore. Students will need your guiding parameters as they explore collaborative work.
Don’t fear noise. Classrooms with experiential learning at play have the buzz of discussion and collaboration, the oops of a mess, the laughter of joy, and the squeal of a surprise discovery.
Provide strength. These spaces will also have the disappointment of a plan going astray.
Be patient. An experiential lesson may take much more time than a textbook lesson on the original content objective. See beyond, though! You’ve touched several inter-disciplinary spaces in the process and you haven’t compromised the education of your students. You have enriched it.
Remember Equity. Remember, the goal is not to teach the content; the goal is to teach the students. All of them. Expectations should be equitable. Keep the process accessible for all, and relevant to the lived experiences of your students.
Looking Ahead
Students in grades K-8 cannot be excluded from the conversation around experiential learning. To truly reap the benefits of this pedagogical practice it is best to start young and create connectedness between content and authentic lived experiences of our students.
