Learning Through Experience

chillibreeze writer — Rajesh Shetty

Experiential learning is about revelations. Yes, it’s about simply and clearly seeing ‘What Is’. It’s not about accumulating knowledge or inventing something new. Every waking moment of our life is nothing but an experience. However, human mind is conditioned in a way that only an unexpected event registers as an ‘experience’.

The fact is, on an average 99% of the time our thoughts are occupied with the past or the future. This deeply-immersed-inside-my-head state not only compromises with the quality of work in hand but also results in biased and conditioned opinions which may be far from the ground reality. The remaining 1% comprises of situations where we give our body, mind and soul to the task at hand - to the present moment.

Couple of days ago, on my way to work, I was stuck in a terrible traffic jam at an unmanned junction. It was a deadlock. Tempers were fraying, fists pounding and horns honking away to glory. In the midst of this chaos, I saw a guy, who had moved his motorbike to a corner, parked it and was trying to find his way to the epicenter of the chaos. It took him good 5 minutes to gain some ground and make the vehicles obey his instructions. By now a couple of other good Samaritans joined him, and slowly but steadily, the jam eased up. As my vehicle passed by him, I saw him absolutely immersed in the task and more importantly, his actions were so spontaneous that they seemed to come from body intelligence rather than a well thought-about plan.

Now, if there are 10 participants in this kind of an event, there is a possibility of 10 different revelations coming out of that experience. The immediate revelation that occurred to me was, when the goal is crystal clear and the task demands immediate attention, a strong intention is good enough to start with. Rest all will fall in place. How many times we sit on a task for weeks together planning and panning it. And there is a lot of difference between reading the moral of a story and actually experiencing it. That’s the primary difference between a classroom teaching or training and experiential learning. An experiential learning set-up is about creating an event, ensuring maximum participation and sharing revelations. There is no teacher or trainer here. And the best part about such an experience is that learning happens just by reflecting upon what happened.

Aristotle once said, "The things we have to learn before we do them, we learn by doing them." Experiential learning is learning through the reflection on ‘doing’. Games and simulations are highly used in experiential learning workshops. This is simply because, through games, people reveal their true behavior. Important part of the training is participants learning from their own mistakes or other participants’ mistakes. With high level of awareness and alertness, adults learn faster through surprises and their own mistakes.

Implementation
Experiential learning is about creating an experience where learning can be facilitated. The key lies with the facilitator and how he or she facilitates the learning process. An excellent facilitator believes in the creed, "You teach some by what you say, teach more by what you do, but most of all, you teach most by who you are."

An experiential facilitator should be able to immerse participants totally in the experience, allowing them to learn from their peers and the learning atmosphere created. These facilitators stimulate the imagination, keeping participants hooked on the experience.

"Tell me and I will forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I will understand". - Confucius

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—About our writer:

Mr.Shetty is an Engineer-turned-Outbound Trainer-turned-writer. Though this seems like a paradigm shift, it turned out to be an obvious choice considering his love for outdoors and travel. Born and brought up in a tiny village called Shirva, nestled in the coastal belt of Karnataka, he is currently based in Bangalore.

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