A Life of Lived Experience, in Education
Some things just don’t need defending. For example, statements like ‘students learn best when they are actively engaged’, or, ‘students are more likely to learn when the lesson is relevant to their own lives’. Even, and still, ‘everyone learns differently, preferring different modalities’…although the particulars of this may have been taking a bit of a hit lately.
Similarly, there is a general consensus that experiential learning or ‘learning through experience’ is the best way to ensure all of the above: returning high rates of understanding, retention, and even improved application of newly acquired knowledge to novel circumstances.
Yes, experiential learning — the silver bullet. A panacea.
However, and in spite of shared beliefs and an ample measure of good intentions, traditional bricks&mortar schools and digital education services struggle to consistently deliver the conditions that support experiential learning, in-person or online.
Considering the what and why we still teach the way we do in schools — or online — would require at least a couple of posts in and of itself. Nonetheless, we can all likely agree on an underlying premise; that schooling generally defaults to methodologies broadly defined by the pragmatic, teaching to the middle, and oftentimes focussed simply on getting as many students as possible through the curriculum on any given day, by whatever means, as opposed to aspiring to optimal pedagogies. There’s good reasons for this, of course, when talking about traditional bricks&mortar education — not least because it’s particularly challenging to deliver optimal learning conditions for every learner when you have a full class of students with differing needs and levels and readiness for learning.
That said, there is certainly merit in holding fast to the lofty goal of creating optimal learning conditions of the kind enabled by learning through experience.
This is particularly true when visioning and building a digital future in education — unencumbered by the restrictions of location, time, learner readiness, pace and trajectory of learning, to name but a few variables in the metrics of successful educational provision. In digital education, edtech at scale, anything and everything is possible all of the time — even experiential learning.
It’s not as though we’re starting from scratch in thinking about experiential learning.
There’s no shortage of pedagogical theory and benchmarks from leading thinkers and education practitioners. The American sweetheart of educational theory himself, John Dewey, prepared the theoretical groundwork for us long ago in his oft-cited 1938 short read ‘Experience and Education’. The problem has been of course, that until recently — the present digital revolution in education — it’s been really difficult to implement, given the dominance of in-person Bricks&Mortar education and the limitations arising in its practicalities.
The path is open, the route clear yet undefined.
Dewey recognized, for example, that it’s not just any experience in any order, but rather learning experiences leading the learner through what he described as ‘a continuity and interaction between the learner and what is learned’. For this, today, thankfully we have AI, and some really powerful features that are creating a whole new set of opportunities for generating unlimited variation in personalized learning pathways, powered by adaptive learning architectures, including for example innovative startups like SanaLabs.
Move aside static video instruction. Get out of the way explanatory text. No-thank-you pre-tests and questionnaires. Let’s get straight into the learning, with full control and freedom, experiential education from the start.
Recently, I discovered an elegant experience-based learning app that was new to me, although successful in its own space for a number of years — TinyBop. Obviously as a teacher, founder and true believer in the principle of education for all through edtech at scale, I’m keenly interested in innovations that extend opportunities for more learning, better learning, by everyone. Fortunately for me, I also happen to have a group of handy beta testers in my children at-the-ready for a quick review, feedback and drop tests; always happy to share a few home truths to temper my biases. Downloaded, premium subscription on, I handed the set of TinyBop learning experiences over to the 10 and 8 year old hardened beta testers in our house and waited and watched… in anticipation of the first question, a puzzled look, even a bemused ‘can I stop now?’.
No video tutorials. No background reading. No pre-assessments or onboarding questionnaires. Just straight into experience — full control and freedom, interactive-first, experiential learning from the start. John would be proud.
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