By William Seidman
I’m working with a company that is asking traditional instructional designers to develop experiential learning activities – which are different in conception, design, and actual practice from what these designers are used to doing. There’s an inherent struggle: it’s difficult to be learner-focused if you are sticking to traditional design.
In experiential learning, everything begins with the learner experience.
New ideas and new stimulation are useful only if they connect with the learners’ current abilities and ways of doing things – with who they are, right now. A student isn’t a vessel into which the instructor pours knowledge. In addition, the learning must have enough of the right types of repetition to be internalized.
Traditional instructional design is much more about telling people what they should know — and telling them very specifically what they will do — to learn something.
In my view, there’s an unspoken inherent mistrust of the learner in the process, and in any “teaching” in which the course designer and instructor are in charge.
The neuroscience of learning proves over and over again that experiential learning, in contrast, is all about providing learners with activities, and trusting that they will learn the “right” lessons, and also trusting that they will continue to learn the right lessons often enough to produce long-term change.
The difference in perspective between a trusting and a not-trusting teaching method is where I’ve found great opportunities for learning, creativity, and growth.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
This is a simple but powerful posting, Bill… Well done!
It’s scary to loosen the reigns a little and put the control (responsibility) into the learner’s hands. There is always the worry that they ‘don’t know what they don’t know’ and need OUR expert (and didactic) tutoring to fully round out their knowledge/skills, but that discounts your employee’s native thinking abilities which led you to hire them in the first place. It seems odd that we trust them to do their day-to-day jobs and make solid real-time analysis of needs and decisions, but when it comes to learning new things, we revert back to a grade-school ID strategy.
An analogy from the ‘story-based learning’ arena comes to mind. There is always a concern that if we don’t explicitly spell out the ‘lesson/moral’ that learners should come away with, having heard a story/example, they are at risk for drawing an inappropriate or incomplete conclusion. It turns out, however, that people are terrific/natural ‘sense-making machines’ and leaving a few key ‘gaps’ in the instruction is a powerful means towards transforming the content from being external to the learner to something that is personalized and meaningful. The gaps force the learner to work at connecting the dots (rather than being passive/spoon-fed) and create a mapping of the information to their own situation, making it more ‘real’ in terms of potential application. We have to trust that this age-old cognitive process will hold true within our training events.
That all having been said, I think it’s healthy to examine the assumptions that may quietly rest beneath the question (for some readers) – that the best approach is an “or” (traditional OR experiential ID), rather than an “and”. A trite chestnut that is a clear oversimplification is “would you rather be a passenger in a car whose driver passed only the written portion of the driver’s test, or who only passed the behind-the-wheel portion?” Almost everyone would agree that, if forced to select only one, we’d opt for whether they can actually drive a car over whether they memorized how many feet per 10 mph they should leave between cars. The trouble is, it’s an artifically constrained scenario – we don’t have to only chose one. We can have ‘traditional’ instruction that is augmented with experiential elements. The answer is an “and”, not an “or” (although some would argue that the traditional school system limits itself to only one… and picked the worst of the two!
).
Keep up the good work, Bill… You keep us all thinking!
Jon