Why Experiential Learning Is The Future
Do you struggle to learn in school? Sitting in a seat thinking about that one time you took a trip to the museum, aquarium, or even your backyard? Seeing and experiencing things first hand and internalizing them better than you could ever from your textbook?
You may be an experiential learner.
Being an experiential learner myself, I found it hard to focus on things that were not right in front of me happening in real-time. There are several advantages to learning experientially.
In 1984, David Kolb published his theory about learning, concluding that there is a four-stage cycle to experiential learning, one of the four learning styles, that has been thoroughly researched by many but made known by David Kolb professionally.
The Experiential Learning Cycle:
- The first stage in the cycle of experiential learning is concrete evidence. These are the experiences that a person encounters that is either completely new to them or a reiteration of what they’ve previously encountered. This is the first and most important step, Once the person encounters this experience they are faced with the decision to internalize the experience in one of the four learning styles.
- Stage two of the cycle is the reflective observation of the presented experience. Once the experience is over, it is up to the person to reflect and review the experience to determine what they have learned and will lead to the next stage in the cycle.
- Stage three is abstract conceptualization, this is where the person rises a new idea or modifies an existing abstract concept to conclude and finally learn about the experience. This part of the stage is what makes experiential learning different than traditional learning, We are conditioned to learn in a classroom, with repetition and practicing instead of experiencing and practicing RIGHT after.
- Stage four is active experimentation, where the person is given an experience, reflects, internalizes, and finally will apply their knowledge to the world around them. This stage will send you back to concrete evidence BUT will equip you with the knowledge and experience to better plan for experiences you encounter later on.
How Experiential Learning Has Helped Me
I am currently a student at The Knowledge Society, a program where we often receive challenges that help us grow and learn. These challenges have taught me how efficient it is to jump into the deep end and learn to swim.
Throughout my year in the program, I learned about different emerging technologies, but by far my favorite activity has been partnerships that TKS has facilitated with students and billion-dollar companies to create complex challenges where we work to recommend solutions to their real problems. Partners even implement solutions that have the most knowledge, and depth about their problem, making it easy for them to take your recommendation and make a difference!
With experiential learning, I have gained a better insight into the projects we have received and has allowed me to maximize my standards for future experiences.
Barclays Center Partners With The Knowledge Society
Barclays Center is a 19,000 seat arena that is located in Brooklyn, NYC, and is currently competing for #1 Best Arena in New York City!
The main goal for the Barclays center challenge was to help BSE Global — the company that holds and manages Barclays Center to increase revenue and overall ticket sales using new and improved methods.
With this challenge, we learned about team collaboration and gained experience in a real-world corporate environment. The winners were invited to speak to BSE’s executive team of programming and development to personally pitch the idea presented in their recommendation deck.
Diving Deeper Into Barclays Center Challenge:
If you haven’t guessed it by now, My team were the winners of this challenge, and were invited into BSE Global Headquarters in New York and pitched our ideas in person!! This was a very rewarding experience and improved many aspects of my personal and professional life. In my personal life, I have always strived to be the best version of myself, learning as much as possible, and at the end of the day be able to spread the knowledge I have learned. Professionally, I learned what corporate executives expect from meeting with you and how to speak confidently in a scenario in which I would have otherwise been nervous. As a reward for winning the challenge, we were offered the opportunity to meet the BSE team!
Meeting the BSE team to this day is surreal, and to explain how this meeting went: we followed them into a very modern room, that was something out of my dreams! The meeting was very professional and learned about what our recommendation lacked. While talking about the recommendation, The BSE executive team even mentioned that what they found most appealing was the data we uncovered for them, giving them all that they needed to implement our recommendation was very helpful. We learned what things work and do not work in that environment and what would be expected of us in future partnerships. After that day, a spark for personal growth was lit under me.
Solution:
The “problem” given to us was to “increase overall revenue and ticket sales while at the same time implementing modern practices.” Our solution to BSE Global was to propose a new look for their mobile application + add a rewards system that would give back to the people who are loyal to the Barclays Center. The reason they said that they chose what we recommended was that it was simple, it was easy to implement and we did all the math for them, increasing the credibility of our research.
If you would like to take a look at the full recommendation, click here.
Kidogo Partners With The Knowledge Society:
The main goal of this challenge was to partner with Kidogo, a social enterprise that improves access to quality, affordable early childhood care & education in east Africa’s low-income communities. TKS’ objective was to improve revenue for their “mommapreneurs” women who are teaching and housing the many children in these low-income communities. Our prize? — getting to fly to Kenya to work with these amazing partners!
These challenges taught me what it means to stand by your data, how important intensive research is, and to not be afraid to dive right into a project!
Growing As You Learn:
Amidst these challenges, I realized that I was learning what seemed like SO MUCH more than I did when learning about marketing, corporations, and economies. While in school, I didn’t learn anything about making recommendation decks, working with random teammates, talking to executives, and yet because of my short time in TKS, I was able to do it all, and well. I still have so much to learn about these different skills, but as time passes, I can learn more about them when I physically and mentally experience them as opposed to just being taught by listening and repeating.
Being an experiential thinker along with traditional learning methods isn’t effective. Most students may be experiential thinkers and not even know it.
If students were put into environments where they could unlock their learning potential, they would internalize and learn 10x better than the every-night reading that you’re assigned when you go home.
We retain approximately 10 percent of what we see; 30 to 40 percent of what we see and hear; and 90 percent of what we see, hear, and do. We all can learn via all three styles but are usually dominant in one.
School is teaching students to retain hardly 30 to 40 percent of the information that is being taught to us, and what’s worse is that teaching has tests and quizzes involved. If I was to take a quiz on my experience of building a recommendation for the marketing team, I would succeed, and if I was to take a quiz about the reading I did on a subject taught in history, I would not do so well, and not because I’m a bad student.
What Would Experiential Learning Based School Look Like?
I understand where this can get a bit complicated because how WOULD you learn?
I believe the change from regular teaching to experiential, would be a lot easier than we think. Some examples of experiential learning, are field trips and hands-on learning, although not all hands-on activities are experiential ones. In a school where experiential learning is the norm, it would be beneficial to have classes that are do-as-you learn, Imagine learning about the chemical bonds in chemistry, while being able to see how they react towards each other. I only had 1 lab my entire chemistry class year, and from that lab, I can still describe why the chemical reaction of a pink solution turning clear happened. In classes like social studies or history, the same thing applies, standing where the civil war was fought, or learning about space from looking into telescopes. There is so much to learn about the world outside of the classroom. An amazing real-time example of this is Minerva Schools at KGI.
Why Experiential Learning Is The Future:
As the world grows increasingly mobile, the attention spans of teens are becoming increasingly small, and because of that, we’re constantly looking for the next shot of dopamine from our phones.
It’s getting harder to concentrate on something like a classroom, where it’s quiet, a teacher speaking about a subject that doesn’t cater to the different types of learning methods.
Going backward, I spoke about these challenges that were offered to me by The Knowledge Society because of the amount of knowledge and depth of understanding I gained in a couple of months. Not only was I able to obtain experiences that are generally completed by adults with pre-existing knowledge, but I was able to broaden my perspective which is one of the most important things you can gain.
Perspective:
Perspective is one of the most important things someone can have, and as someone who learns based on experiences, I would say that its one of my strongest skills. Learning to see the world the way that other people do is what will help you succeed and overall make a difference.
There’s an ongoing joke amongst people my age “Why are we learning this if we’re never gonna see it again” and chances are you might not, but anything that is taught by a school is VALUABLE information but is not being delivered correctly. It’s all about perspective and some learners are not favored in our educational system.
A huge thank you to The Knowledge Society for allowing me to unlock real potential and letting me see the world for what it is, the world is your own and what you make of it is the only thing that matters.
Kolb, D. A., & Fry, R. (1975). Toward an applied theory of experiential learning. In C. Cooper (Ed.), Studies of group process (pp. 33–57). New York: Wiley.
Contact Me:
Hey, My name is Dexter Barahona. I’m an 18-year-old Innovator at The Knowledge Society. I’ve been mainly focusing on machine learning and AI. Recently, I have been pursuing my dream to become a full stack developer and will be writing articles on things I find interesting! :)
Email: dexteralxbarahona@gmail.com
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