Learning From Experience

Learning From Experience.

“Learning from one’s experience involves not just reflection, but critical reflection.”

Objective:

Experiential Learning plays a powerful and significant role in adult learning. A majority of the things we know, like everyday skills such as how to drive a car are learned through experiences. These are things you don’t learn from a textbook or in a lecture. Often we only critically reflect on the extremely negative experiences, such as when in a car accident. It is actually hard not to critically analyze a near death experience, as this is second nature to ensure our survival for the next time we are faced with that situation. We can also gain from critically reflecting on everyday experiences or learning situations, even positive experiences that could be further improved upon.

Critical reflection is the meat of experiential learning. When an experience occurs, whether it is positive or negative, the important part is to consider why that outcome was achieved, and what might be done in the future to improve upon it.

Mezirow was the theorist who defined Critical Reflection. He stated that “Perhaps even more central to adult learning than elaborating established meaning schemes is the process of reflecting back on prior learning to determine whether what we have learned is justified under present circumstances. This is a crucial learning process egregiously ignored by learning theorists.” (Mezirow, 1990:5)

One may question whether shoulder checking is the best technique to use before changing lanes, perhaps the situation was more complex and there were multiple distractions that played into the situation as well. One may question that what was previously taught may not have been sufficient, or what failed to be learned was that shoulder checking is useful when you are already previously aware of everyone around you, and you have been monitoring the situation for some time.

Critical reflection is different from reflection in that it is not just observing what happened but going more in-depth and considering all of the reasons of why and how that outcome was achieved.

Reflective:

As a teacher it is important to focus more on why something is important. In the case of the car accident, if the student knew that the reason we shoulder check is only to check the blind spot after mirrors are monitored to avoid collision from cars that may be speeding up from behind, there may have been a more conscious effort prior to attempting to change lanes.

Luckily I do not teach subjects that are life or death, but it becomes clearer when providing an example that is. Explaining why as well as providing students with multiple real life scenarios to problem solve in the classroom are one way to help students reflect on past experiences they have had, or be more prepared for when they do encounter the scenario in the future.

Interpretive:

My first thought after reflecting on this is that we should probably spend more time reflecting and less time doing, which would actually result in much more intelligent and efficient methods. After critically reflecting on this process, I realized the reason we don’t do this is because ‘time is money’ in the real world and decisions need to be made yesterday. I would still argue a greater amount of time should be allocated towards critical reflection to improve efficiency as much as possible.

Decisional:

This quote has encouraged me to critically reflect on my student’s progress throughout courses and to evaluate my teaching to help improve my lessons for the future. Some ways I plan to incorporate critical reflection into my classes are to:

Create exercises for students to critically evaluate their own progress, by reflecting back on previously taught material. I can have them correlate what they knew previously with what they know now.
I can reflect back to previously taught materials in my lectures and demonstrations to help students critically evaluate what they have learned.
I can use scenarios that students may have encountered previously in their lives to relate to the content I am teaching them and provide them the opportunity to think about how they would handle the same situation now, knowing the new content
I know that I learn best from making mistakes, by creating an activity where I deliberately lead my students to make a mistake (not by teaching them incorrect methods of course) and then assist them to get out of the situation. This provides the student a perfect opportunity to critically evaluate what went wrong.

A "Critical" Reflection Framework. (2007). Retrieved from http://www.education.vic.gov.au/Documents/childhood/professionals/support/reffram.pdf

Atherton, J. (2013). Critical Reflection. Retrieved from http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/critical1.htm

Experiential Learning. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiential_learning

Kenny, N. (2010). What is Critical Reflection? Retrieved from http://opened.uoguelph.ca/pdf/Critical Reflection.pdf