Prepared in association with Teachers College, Columbia University. © 2012 TEFL-C International Ltd. All rights reserved.

Experiential Learning Theory–Worksheet 1

1. Dewey was a proponent of progressivism and contextual learning. Search briefly on the Internet for these two terms and write a short explanation of each below. Use credible sources. Then, make a connection between your own learning experiences as they relate to each of these concepts.

2. Describe a learning by doing experience you have had. Describe how you feel it has affected your retention of the material involved in the experience. Contrast this experience to a more traditional cram method we employ so often.

Prepared in association with Teachers College, Columbia University. © 2012 TEFL-C International Ltd. All rights reserved.

3. Kolb talked about learning as a fluid cycle. Here are the steps in Kolb’s Cycle: We start off with Concrete Experience – Take, for example, you are learning to make a wonderful new raw foods’ dish known as “rawsagna”. Rawsagna is a trendy dish popping up in health conscious restaurants around the world. It is a salad version, or raw foods’ version of lasagna in that it is made with organic raw vegetables. You go to a restaurant and you have this amazing dish. It is healthy and delicious. You want to make it at home. You analyze the dish and realize it is just thin slices of zucchini with ground cashews mixed with oil in between. Then, you notice a tomato sauce on the top. You begin to think about how you can slice the zucchini and make the ground cashews and the tomato sauce. This is your Reflection Observation stage. You come up with some abstract concepts (Abstract Conceptualization) of how you can grind cashews in the blender with some olive oil and garlic and then layer it between zucchini slices. Then, you imagine yourself smashing some tomatoes with your hands and mixing in some salt, oil, and basil and stacking the layers like a traditional lasagna dish. You are not sure if it will work. But these are the abstract concepts you come up with. Then, you go through the next stage of learning. This is called Active Experimentation. In this stage, you attempt the recipe yourself. After making the recipe, you eat it. When you eat it, you are back at stage one of the learning process. You are having this concrete experience with the dish again. You go to the next stage which is reflective observation again. At this point, you take note of what you did right and wrong with the recipe. Then, you make some abstract concepts of what you will do next time to fine tune the recipe. Finally, you will do some more active experimentation when you make the dish again. Note: Go to Google Images and do a search for Kolb’s Cycle and you will see a number of graphic images to help reinforce the concept. You see the process is cyclical. Learning a new language is the same thing. We have an active experience with the language. We reflect on the meaning of the new words we heard or how we said the new words in a given situation. We come up with some abstract concepts of how we will deal with the language next time. Then, we go through some active experimentation with the language. We then return to phase one again. With language learning as with other types of learning, this cycle goes on forever.

Prepared in association with Teachers College, Columbia University. © 2012 TEFL-C International Ltd. All rights reserved.

Describe a learning experience you have had where you go through the stages. Label each stage and describe the experience at each stage. It can be a new skill or concept you learned, or it can be a language learning experience. Note: Of course, in your learning experience, you repeated this cycle many times until you “mastered” or “acquired” the concept. You can just write about one phase in the learning experience.

Learning Experience

Describe the experiences you had at each stage.

Concrete

Experience

Reflection

Observation

Abstract

Conceptualization

Active

Experimentation