Experiential learning transforms abstract concepts into tangible experiences, fostering a deeper curiosity and understanding for students. Below you’ll find some information about experiential learning, and five tips for successfully creating engaging learning opportunities that captivate students and encourage a lifelong love of discovery.
What Is Experiential Learning and Why Is It Important?
As the name suggests, Experiential Learning Theory is the process of an experience transforming into a learning moment. David A. Kolb defined learning as: “…the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience.”
Just as a student driver must practice on a real road before taking a final test, so should any student experience “the real thing” to learn most effectively. You wouldn’t want to be a passenger in an airplane piloted by someone who had only learned out of a book. The same goes for surgeons, builders, artists . . . you get the idea.
Of course, in the classroom, the ‘real thing’ can be hard to come by. It isn’t, after all, so easy for educators to walk students around the first Jamestown settlement, or experience zero-gravity, in order to absorb knowledge of the lessons being taught. But using immersive learning techniques and principles can help educators come closer to true experiential learning than ever before.
So how do we go about creating these experiences? How do we set ourselves, and our students, up for success?
Here’s an anecdote of an engaging experiential learning experience I planned for my students:
There are several reasons why this lesson was a success—here are five tips for experiential learning opportunities like this one.
1. Let Students Do It Themselves
During this lesson, we collectively embalmed and mummified a paper-mâché body, and every single student in the room was attentive. This is because the students were being selected one by one to come up and extract body parts made from wet sponges and spaghetti, and they all wanted to be next. Not only is this attitude infectious, but it also supports your classroom management as you have a ready-made reward for positive behavior.
Don’t forget that students can participate in lots of ways, so make up as many opportunities as you can. Why not ask a student to stand beside the display board and highlight each step in the process as you go along, or choose a student to pass the correct tool from a tray? That student will remember the part they played and the responsibility they were given, which will also help them feel more connected to the lesson as a result.
2. Promote Active Listening
So, what was it about the mummification lesson that made every student confident enough to raise their hand and participate?
The secret lay in the teachers’ performance. As teachers, we displayed the correct instructions for the embalming process where everyone could see them, and it was the students who directed the experiment, giving them agency and confidence as a group. They could only come and participate in the embalming if they knew what stage came next in the sequence, and active listening was encouraged by the teachers’ pretending not to know which step came next.
Educators must find ways to scaffold student learning, so that they are not tempted to step in and correct students’ actions. One way to try this is by allowing students to correct the educator! In the mummification experience, before each student removed an organ, the teacher told the class loudly (and incorrectly) which organ they thought should come next. When the group called back that the teacher was wrong and corrected them, the active student knew which body part to extract and why. Avoiding negative experiences for the active student meant that with each extraction, even the most reserved students grew more confident to take part.
3. Use Ready-Made Digital Experiences
I won’t pretend that this lesson didn’t include a lot of prep work. If you don’t have time to paper-mâché or your topic can’t physically be recreated in the classroom, then don’t give up!
Enter the world of digital immersive learning experiences. There are many digital resources available that are fundamentally based on experiential learning theory and can transport students to impossible times and places. Students can try out real career roles, and experience dangerous scenarios in complete safety thanks to technology.
Explore 3D Virtual Field Trips for experiential learning opportunities, complete with facilitator guides and standards-aligned activities:
TimePod Adventures: Plesiosaur Encounter
Haul!: A 3D Virtual Field Trip to a Copper Mine
3D Virtual Field Trips Channel
4. Have Fun
Whatever experience you plan for your students, make sure you enjoy it too.
Immersive experiences hold power because they elicit emotional responses from students, and a personal connection to the learning. You are the role model in this session. Model the enthusiasm and the curiosity that you want to see from the students. I didn’t stop them from exclaiming when I was hooking my cadaver’s “brain” (an unraveled net shower sponge soaked in jelly) out through its nose. I pulled faces too, and showed all the concentration that I would expect from a top surgeon. I explained why it was so important to get this right on behalf of the deceased person – and saw that when my students took part, they showed the same care and attention too.
Be confident (or pretend to be), and you can’t go wrong. My paper-mâché body didn’t look anything like a real person. Ancient Egyptians didn’t wear lab coats and plastic goggles, or wheel their subjects around on lunch carts, but the experience was well worth the inaccuracies. The students were fully engaged and allowed themselves to be swept along, absorbing knowledge along the way. They showed frustration in all the right places and shouted “STOP!” when we pretended to do the process wrong.
5. Make It Memorable
One of the ways in which immersive experiences can amplify learning is they help students to retain information much longer than lessons that are all the same and become a blur. This lesson was such a new format for my students that they came away talking about it, remembering which organ belonged in which jar, why the jars had animal heads, which organs remained in the body, and much more. They also became more curious—memorable experiences often spark questions and a desire to explore the topic further.
It is also important to understand that in these situations, the lesson’s learning outcome is not the end point. When taking part in an activity as memorable as this, my students would take the story home with them, teach the information to someone else, recreate the activity later, and learn even more deeply as a result. The more they think over that exciting day, and whichever part of it resonated most with them, the better for their overall development. Who knows, maybe it inspired a future surgeon!
When planning lessons, there are always two major aspects to consider: What skill will my students learn in this lesson? How will the information be presented to them?
Experiential learning can take your students from just absorbing the content in a lesson to actively participating in learning with a hands-on opportunity to practice skills and learn new things!
Hannah McNaughton-Hussain
Hannah McNaughton-Hussain is a UK primary school teacher, experienced digital publisher and manager of Discovery Education’s Immersive Learning Hub. Hannah manages exciting products like Sandbox and TimePod Adventures, and is passionate about the power of transformative learning experiences.
A Word of Caution
Immersion can (and should) elicit emotional responses from students. Always be aware of the potential triggering effect of any realistic experience on specific students in your setting, and exercise due care and attention. There will also always be one child who thinks you really have brought a dead body into the classroom and pulled out its brain through its nose.
