The Benefits of Experiential Learning

By Emily Magnus

If you walk our academic halls, you’ll see students engaged in experiential learning.

They build Ferris wheels using their knowledge of angles, they write book recommendations and share them with real audiences on Goodreads.com, they diagnose patients’ medical conditions based on their knowledge of the systems in the body, and they invent original solutions to everyday problems. It’s not the exception but the norm of a Cardigan education.

Experiential learning has been around long enough–John Dewey was one of its first champions in the early twentieth century–that we all know what it looks like. We know it’s hands-on, engaging, and usually includes real-life scenarios. There is rarely one “right” answer and it often includes stepping outside the classroom.

It is also more than just a teaching theory, more than just a simple method of conveying information to students. John Dewey is most famous for saying, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” And, experiential learning, if done right, has implications far beyond the classroom. Here are five things Cardigan’s students are developing as they engage in new classes and new lessons, both inside the classroom and beyond.

“Middle school should be a time to make mistakes, become comfortable with failure, and use experiences to make learning more durable. Failure is essential as we seek mastery.”

Leo Connally
Dean of Academics

Failure is Productive

For Cardigan’s Dean of Academics Leo Connally, his favorite thing about experiential learning is productive failure. “Failure can be a positive thing if you can learn to learn from it,” he says. “In so much of society today there’s a drive to get it right, to know the answer quickly and with certainty. But middle school should be a time to make mistakes, become comfortable with failure, and use experiences to make learning more durable. Failure is essential as we seek mastery.” 

The sixth graders, for example, as part of a unit on habitats and biomes, set up a motion-activated camera to find out what creatures wander campus when we’re not looking. But what parts of campus are frequented by wild animals? And what’s the best way to entice them to “pose” for the camera? Sixth graders have to decide where to place their camera–based on their academic “book” knowledge–and test their theories. There are no right answers as the students take into consideration the vegetation, the food sources that are readily available, the time of the day, the climate, etc. 

“Middle school is also a time when kids start to form an identity and put themselves into categories–the jocks, the brainy kids,” continues Mr. Connally. “I’m an advocate for breaking the mold, snapping out of it. We’re all learners, we’re all athletes. There are no right answers and there’s no one way to be.” Through productive failure in experiential learning, students develop confidence in their ability to persevere and continue working toward unseen and unknowable finish lines–whether they are capturing wildlife footage, kicking a soccer ball, or discovering their inner voice. They become resilient in the creative process and come to accept that the pursuit of knowledge is messy and has both failures and successes.

Knowledge is Not Stagnant

Students also come to understand that knowledge is not stagnant. 1 + 1 will always equal 2, but so much of knowledge is elastic and changing as new information is absorbed. In the spring as a cumulative review and application of all they have learned, ninth-grade biology students participate in a medical conference in which teams of students are presented with the symptoms of fictitious patients and asked to determine possible diagnoses. Each student doctor becomes a specialist in one of the systems of the human body and orders lab work that will help determine the cause of a patient’s ailments. And while their own tests may point to one diagnosis, no one specialist has all the answers, and students have to be open to the contributions of others, willing to evolve their conclusions. In a world that is constantly changing and discoveries are made daily, Cardigan students are taught to be open to new information, to embrace the unknown, and to work together toward greater truths. 

Making it Stick

Mr. Connally is also an advocate for experiential learning because of its reliance on desirable difficulties to make learning stick. “When you are asked to struggle with solving a problem before being shown how to solve it, the subsequent solution is better learned and more durably remembered,” explains one of Mr. Connally’s favorite books, Make It Stick, by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel.

“Not knowing everything that’s going on makes people pay attention,” explains Mr. Connally. “When something is challenging and doesn’t come quickly, the concentration required to learn that new thing lends itself to higher rates of remembering it. Anything that is difficult, you have to pay attention to.”

Sixth and seventh graders experience this type of learning each spring when they participate in the Pinewood Derby. While students have studied momentum and acceleration, Newton's Laws of Motion, and the basics of aerodynamic design, putting their knowledge into building a vehicle has a lot of unknowns and multiple variables that are interdependent. As they build their cars and compare their own designs to those of their classmates, they see Newton’s Laws of Motion in practice and adjust their plans accordingly. They learn through their mistakes and successes, through trial and error, and through asking questions rather than being given a single, incontrovertible answer. Furthermore, in contrast to learning facts through rote learning, desirable difficulties develop skills and powers of reasoning that last a lifetime and can be applied to a variety of situations. 

Experiential Learning is Collaborative

In a world that is divisive and divided, experiential learning is instead most often collaborative. Two minds think better than one; a variety of perspectives make for a richer, more complete, and more complex picture. In the Gates Invention and Innovation Competition, usually students work together on their inventions, and once they have completed a first prototype, they also are expected to seek feedback from the desired consumers of their product, listening to their suggestions and articulating the next steps forward. Students are given a pass/fail grade for Gates, so the need to perform for their teachers and for a grade is removed. Success is instead focused on working together to develop a successful invention that has real-life applications.

In a world that is divisive and divided, experiential learning is instead most often collaborative. Two minds think better than one; a variety of perspectives make for a richer, more complete, and more complex picture.

The end result of an education that is based in experiential learning is students who are more prepared to be engaged, thoughtful members of a democratic society. In a “sage on the stage” model of education, when students receive knowledge without inquiry, they are passive recipients, ill-equipped to determine fact from fiction, truth from lies, and good from bad. In contrast, experiential learning involves questioning, exploring, testing, and discussing, all of which lead to decisions that are based on reasonable arguments. Students who participate in Cardigan’s Model UN Club certainly learn a great deal of factual information about world politics, but they also learn to think flexibly, negotiate with an open mind, and develop solutions that involve input from multiple sources. Students who take care of the animals in Cardigan’s Living Lab begin by researching facts about the hydration needs, the shelter preferences, and the socialization requirements for each animal, but they also learn to carefully observe the animals under their care and respond to daily changes and variations. Knowing the facts is important, but experiential learning allows students to think beyond facts and develop skills that lead to a lifetime of reasoning and independent thought. 

Boys that are Doing are Boys that are Learning

Head of School Chris Day P’12,’13 often says, “Boys that are doing are boys that are learning.” At the center of learning at Cardigan are experiential opportunities during which students dive in, hands and minds engaged, discovering in tactile assignments how the world works and what role they can play in it. It’s an education that is enduring, flexible, and inclusive. And it will prepare them for “responsible and meaningful lives in a global society.”