I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.
—Confucious
That makes experiential learning at least 2,500 years old.
So why has experiential learning been reborn in Jewish education?
Perhaps it’s because Jewish educators want their students to find meaning in their learning—to have what Outward Bound calls “value forming experiences.”
And one excellent way to do that, of course, is through a direct experience or encounter—something your students can DO. But is a simple experience enough (fun though it may be)? We might, for example, develop an experience for students to “encounter” Purim. We have them create masks, dress up in costume, and eat treats. Sound like a familiar secular holiday to you?
So how do we create experiential learning opportunities that take our students beyond feeling good and having fun in the moment, and actually transmit the values, skills, and knowledge they can take with them into their lives as Jews?
A lot of academic literature suggests there are specific stages or elements of an experiential learning cycle that can make this pedagogical method more effective. Here (from a 1990 article by James Gentry) is a taste of what that might include:
1. Good design. The educator needs to prepare for the learning experience, specifying the content and activities, identifying any factors that might affect student learning, and creating a method for implementing the experience.
2. Effective implementation. The process should be participatory and interactive. It should be active rather than passive, and should involve relationships between students, students and teacher, and students and environment. It should include contact with the environment (real world or simulated). It should allow for variability and uncertainty, i.e., the outcome cannot be scripted, just as in the real world. And finally, the experience must be structured with a balance between autonomy and guidance.
3. Evaluation. In addition to the educator, the students should take part in assessing the success of the program and should demonstrate the specific learning they gained.
4. Feedback. Learning can come from the outcomes (how the activity or experience turned out) and from process feedback (how well decisions were made during the activity).
Would you like a free Power Point presentation for your teachers that addresses some of the issues surrounding effective experiential learning? Let me know and I’ll send it right out to you.
