Transcript

You have been learning from your life experiences since the day you were born. As human beings, we are born to learn and our process of learning goes on all the time without much awareness. But the awareness and understanding of how you learn can increase your learning power. One way to describe the process of learning is called the experiential learning cycle. What you are experiencing in a particular situation is a gateway to learning about it.

Imagine a sailor lost at sea, reflecting begins the process of learning from the experience by working to notice and understand key aspects of it. Our sailor begins to notice the movement of the stars and thinks, maybe I can use the stars to navigate. Thinking analyses these aspects to create conclusions and evaluate decision choices. Our sailor developed some tools to help analyse the stars and applies it to his map.

Acting to implement a chosen decision, leads back to a new situation with emergent consequences to deal with. With map and navigation tools in hand, he sets off on a new journey, but there is always still more to learn as he encounters new experiences. The learning cycle is an idealised model through which we touch all the bases in a learning situation, experiencing, reflecting, thinking, and acting.

Individuals, however, differ in their preferences for the four phases of learning. Their preferences are related to many factors: culture, personality type, life experiences, educational specialisation, career choice, and current job. Differences in preference usually lie somewhere between opposing phases of the learning cycle, thinking versus experiencing. Two opposite ways of taking in the world, either through direct sense experience or by concepts about it.

And acting versus reflecting, two opposite ways of dealing with ideas and experiences, by an inward search for their meaning or by external action in the world. The more deliberate you are about embracing the opposing phases of the learning cycle, the more effective you will become as a learner.