Thoughtful Thursday

​ Thoughtful Thursday at CELOL - by Carl Ebenezer

True to its name the CELOL Meet started outdoors on Thursday evening, with a dozen experiential educators and enthusiasts who were given time to get to know one person whom they have not met earlier & to introduce them to the rest. With presence of experienced facilitators like Praful Patel, fellows from Teach for India (TFI), graduates of our very own Outdoor Leadership workshop, founders of other startups & managers of MNCs, the group was truly rich in diversity.

Led by Diyanat Ali we slowly took part in some activities, which increased our adrenaline (physical), emotional & mental energy, at the same time decreased our inhibition, this set the platform for the discussions which followed after that.

We discussed on the role of an experiential facilitator, which was not to be a solution provider but rather be the catalyst for the solution to emerge, by being open to multiple outcomes. This helped us understand the difference between ‘Experiential Learning’ & ‘Experiential Education’, the former was more of the learning that are captured & discussed during the facilitation and the latter was application of that learning in real life. In which case Experiential Learning is a subset of Experiential Education.

While the fellows from TFI, explored the application of Experiential Learning in schools, we discovered the difference in teaching approaches between a traditional class room, which is more ‘Concept Centered approach’ with a clear end learning outcome versus ‘Facilitative approach’ which is flexible enough to adapt to the real time changes in the learning environment and be open to the multiple learning outcomes that are possible.
​
Even as our thoughts were wondering on the development of experiential education, Diyanat brilliantly gave a broad overview of its evolution in five stages. In stage one, it was simply ‘DOing’ learning through experience. Stage two was ‘DOing + REFLECTing’ on what we just did. Stage three was ‘DOing + REFLECTing and finally APPLYing’ what we learnt through reflection.
In stage four, popularly known as David’s experiential learning cycle which consists of four parts
DO (Concrete Experience) answers ‘What happened?’ - deals with actual doing.
REFLECT is further divided into

• (Reflective Observation) answers ‘What did I experience?’ – Feelings
• (Abstract Conceptualization) answers ‘Why did this happen?’ – Findings

APPLY (Active Experimentation) answers ‘What will I do?’ – Future
In stage five, Pfeiffer & Jones came up with a model consisting of five parts
DO (Experience) deals with actual doing.
REFLECT is further divided into

• (Share) answers ‘What happened?’ Publicly share results, reactions & observation.
• (Process) answers ‘What’s important?’ Discusses how the experience was carried out.

APPLY is further divided into

• (Generalize) answers ‘So What?’ Connecting the experience with real world examples.
• (Apply) answers ‘Now what?’ Apply what was learned to a similar or different situation.

After this, couple of memorable high energy activities, literally got us going to our homes..:)