Five Ways to Integrate Experiential Learning into Your Training

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Experiential learning is all about using experience to help people develop new abilities and insights. When used with groups of people who already have some baseline experience and knowledge, it allows you to help learners develop deeper levels of understanding. It also enables you to move beyond simply telling people what they should do into helping them make changes in the way they work.

1. Plan a process, not an event. Any real learning starts with what people already know, believe and do. The new concepts and experiences that make up your training need to acknowledge and sometimes challenge these existing beliefs and practices. Of course, learning does not end when people go back to work. You also need to help them put their new insights into action while continuing to learn and refine their efforts along the way. To this purpose, useful tools include learning goals, action plans, projects, peer support groups and learning journals.
2. Use assessments to increase people’s self-awareness. Experiential learning is founded upon a belief that when people become more consciously aware of their own tendencies, they are better able to make informed choices about how they act in the future. Personality measures, observational feedback, self-assessment inventories and 360-degree feedback are all good ways to incorporate assessment into your program. In addition, some assessments like the TKI also allow you to link conceptual material being covered (conflict management, in the case of the TKI) to the personal experiences and realities of each learner.
3. Link new concepts to learners’ previous experiences. For example, when training managers to give more feedback to staff, you may have them recall times when they failed to voice their thoughts and concerns to a particular individual. You can then ask them to explore how the language and concepts that you have just introduced can help them better understand these previous experiences and the lessons they may hold.
4. Provide opportunities for people to experiment with new behaviours within the safety of the training group. Learning through doing lies at the very heart of what experiential learning is all about. These practice sessions help people to move beyond knowing what to do and start doing what they know. It is only through ongoing practice and feedback that people develop mastery over new skills.
5. Use simulated experiences as a starting block from which people can explore group processes. You do not need to organise expensive outdoor experiences. Simple indoor activities such as simulations, games and cases work just as well. To be effective, these experiences need to challenge participants in ways that force them to act and interact, then allow them to reflect on and discuss what happened. Done well, this enables each learner to become more aware of their own behaviours and how they affected the group. You can also encourage people to use any recently covered models and concepts to help them better understand the experience that they now all share.

A word of warning: experiential learning is neither the most effective nor the most efficient way of training people with little or no prior experience in and knowledge about the topic at hand. In such cases, the old “show-and-tell” approach works best. Experiential methods may be productively used to reinforce the show-and-tell approach (e.g., having new managers practise using a script for giving feedback to staff, but only if you first show people the script).

Tagged as: Experiential Learning