Here is how you can turn a lesson into a lived experience and make it a lesson for life
Prerna Shivpuri
From our childhood, we learnt so much from just playing on the streets. Lessons of equity and justice were learnt by negotiating for swings, playing in the mud and by sharing a new shining ball; empathy and care were built on getting into conflicts and helping a friend who got hurt. Our everyday life taught us so many important lessons that its importance cannot be undermined. Yet in our schools, we often miss out on leveraging the power of experiences in learning and rely mostly on textbooks as the main source of classroom learning. Textbooks are one of the tools of learning and not necessarily the most important ones.
A lot of our conceptual learning, skill-building and character development happens when we engage in real-life experiences. These experiences have natural feedback mechanisms that immediately gives us a response about our actions and make our learning deeper and long-lasting. For instance, a child who observes eggs laid by a butterfly on a plant and then observes the plant daily to note how the egg changed into a caterpillar, then to a pupa and then finally into a butterfly is more likely to understand and connect with concepts of growth, change and life cycle than a child who reads about it in a book and sees some pictures. This experience will stay with him and will be a part of his memory and knowledge for a long time. We are all sensorial beings and if learning is facilitated for us through immersive sensorial experiences, we not only retain and understand it better but also enjoy the process of learning.
This might give rise to the question whether it is possible to make all learning experiential. Would the days and schedules of a packed school calendar provide room to design and facilitate such learning experiences? There is, of course, no simple answer to this question but there are certainly ways in which we can do at least some justice to this.
“It seems to me our biggest goal is somehow to involve them so much in the curriculum that they’re studying, that their interest is natural. The world should hold excitement and joy and thrill as we explore it and find out how it works and what it’s made of. We should be able to take things around us that we’ve just been so jaded to, even the children, they just take it all for granted, and somehow wake those up out of the tomb of the taken for grantedness, and look at it with a fresh eye.And find that in them is sometimes material for fantastic and extraordinary learning experiences.”– Steven Levy, Consultant, Expeditionary Learning
Kolb’s Learning Cycle: The four components of an immersive learning experience
Educational psychologist Dr. David Kolb pro- posed the framework of an experiential learn- ing cycle. He said that for any learning to be deep and sustained, all of us need to go through these four stages. Depending upon our preferred learning styles, we might enter this cycle from one stage and then move to the rest. For instance, some of us prefer to observe and listen first, reflect on it and then move on to action whereas some of us straightaway get into experimentation and reflect later.
We need to ensure that in our classrooms, we try to cover all these stages of
experience when we teach.
We might not be able to do all
four at all times but can try to do two or three over a unit plan. A simple example
of this
could be taking
students out for a walk in your school and asking
them to observe
the differ- ent sources of water they can see in their school (Concrete Experience). They note it in their journals while walking around and then come back and have a discussion in the class- room about how many sources they
saw, at which stage the teacher
can engage them in a reflective
question: In how many places
was the water being used
judiciously? (Reflective
Observation) After this, the students are asked to go home and collect the same data from their homes and neighbourhood and share any patterns they saw. As they share, the teacher asks them a Guiding Question: “Where does this water come from and where does it go?” (Abstract Conceptualisation)
Students can engage in research and more data collection and interpret the data. As an action step, they can put together a report and recommendations presentation or manual suggesting practices to conserve water in the school (Active Experimentation). In this way, the learning cycle gets completed for the students and they will remember these concepts for a long time as they have connected them with real-life application. If we plan our lessons and units keeping this cycle in mind, we will be able to facilitate deeper and enjoyable learning experiences for our students. It surely does take time, but if thought of at the time of planning and spread out over a period of time, it will be feasible even amidst your tight schedules.
Differentiating the experiences
The other aspect to consider is that all our students learn differently. They have their strengths and their preferences. As seen in Kolb’s learning cycle, every child enters an experience with their preferred learning style. We, therefore, need to keep this diversity in mind when we plan our lessons and see how we can differentiate instruction as much as possible to reach out to every child. For instance, all experiences should not be outdoors or involve something physical. We need to design diverse experiences so that over a period of time, say a month, each child gets something they connect with easily. Some examples of these could be nature walks, creating a song or a rap together, a literature circle or book talk, audio-visual aids or having a review or panel discussion after viewing a movie, making presentations or sculptures or pottery, story-weaving, gallery walk, guest speakers, dialogue circles and so on.
The Mystery Element
I have worked with pre–primary students as well as with adults and something that I found really interesting was the fact that any learner at any age responds to having a ‘mystery element’ in the class in a wonderful way. When we present an experience to them in a way that they feel something magical, something mysterious is about to happen, they instantly get hooked to it and the experience becomes even more immersive for them. At the core of deep learning lies the quest to uncover all the mysteries and phenomena our world is made of. Our students should see classroom learning as a way of uncovering these phenomena about the world and enter the classroom with curiosity and joy. These lines by Drew Perkins, Director, Teach Thought Professional Development (2018) beautifully sum up the essence of this:
“Good teaching puts the content in the bright lights and illuminates it in ways that makes it accessible. Great teaching shrouds that content in mystery and meaningful challenges so compelling it becomes nearly impossible to keep learners from it.”
Inquiry Question
Reflect on something you have learnt that has stayed with you for long. It could be a skill you learnt or an art form you are adept at. Now try to see the stages of Kolb’s learning cycle. Most certainly, you will realise that you had exercised all these four stages while you were learning this. Now think of a lesson you taught some time ago and see if you could have planned it differently keeping these stages in mind.
Try a Tip
Plan and execute any one lesson keeping in mind the diverse learning styles of your students and how you can create a few experiences over a week that cater to the different learning styles. Use only one topic and try some simple planning. Plan for two or three different types of experiences and then reflect on how your students responded to them.
Prerna Shivpuri is Academic Head, I Am A Teacher, Mumbai. IAAT, a not-for-profit organisation, is committed to building a model of excellence for teacher education in India.
