Experiential Learning enables educators, trainers, coaches and facilitators to unleash some of the more potent ingredients of learning through experience. It presents a simple the Learning Combination Lock, which illustrates the wide range of factors that can be altered to enhance the learning experience. The theory is brought to life with hundreds of examples from around the world and covers issues such experience and intelligence; facilitation, good practice and ethics; learning environments; experiential learning activities; and working with the senses and emotions. Experiential Learning offers the skills that can be successfully applied to a variety of settings including management education, corporate training, team-building, youth-development work, counselling and therapy, schools and higher education and special needs training. This fully updated third edition includes guidance for coaches, cutting edge new material on sensory intelligence and updated models, tools and case studies throughout.
This is the kind of book where you can use a pick-and-mix approach and still manage to grasp the overall ideas fairly well. This is mainly because of the way it has been outlined and scaffolded by summaries and inside references to prior or previous chapters. There is an ostensible effort put to defining and conceptualizing, although I feel that the metaphorical illustrations of concepts (the tumbler system) is not straightforward and not really helpful. The book is however quite readable and easy to navigate, with references galore. The practical side (chapter 9) is not thorough, which is understandable, given the large scope of the book.
This book was a challenge to get through as it could get a bit dry. However, I believe it will become a regularly used reference. When I started reading it my job focused on teaching, and so I kept applying it to my role as a teacher. When I was about half way through the book, I became college registrar and my job focus became administration. Nonetheless, as I continued to read I found myself apply the content to my new role as manager of the academic records team. It is not that the book changed focus, but that I saw the application to my new career. In other words, the principles in this book can be applied to teaching and management roles. The book covered a wide range of experiential learning approaches. The numerous case studies provided meaningful real world examples.