The Agile Classroom

The image above is from the famous Christmas show called “A Christmas Story”. If you have ever lived in a cold climate, as I have, you are all too familiar with the “don’t lick a frozen pole” lesson.

This is a classic case study for experiential learning. Until you have experienced it, you just can’t really process what is going to happen. It doesn’t matter if someone else tells you about it, or you read something about it, or even see this picture. The lesson doesn’t “stick” with you until you actually experience it. This is not an endorsement for people to go out and stick their tongues to a frozen pole! I’m just saying, some things can only be truly learned through experience. I’m going to translate this concept into something I believe is a hybrid of experiential learning and agile practices applied to the classroom.

Experiential learning is what we do naturally from the time we are infants. We probe and touch and taste the world around us. Some are positive experiences, like discovering the sweetness of chocolate. Some can be more painful or challenging, like learning to walk and falling down a lot before we get the hang of it.

If you have followed any of my writing, you know that write a lot about agile software development and business agility. In this article, I want to suggest that experiential learning in a classroom can apply agile approaches, with rapid experimentation and review. Why not achieve learning objectives the same way we expect teams and organizations to learn in the work place?

If you are in academics you are probably familiar with David Kolb’s “Experiential Learning Cycle”. Kolb published a book on the topic in 1984 and was considered “ground breaking” in his breakdown of the way adults naturally learn through experiences.

I believe the concept from Kolb is pretty straight forward. We experience something, reflect on that experience, develop perceptions based on our observations, and then we experiment to further refine our understanding. Think about how you experience a new food. You taste it (the concrete experience) and you may roll it around in your mouth observing the texture before swallowing it. Then you draw comparisons to other foods you have eaten before. Then you experiment. You might mix this food with another food, or add salt or other condiments to see if you can improve on it. Learning a new technical skill or developing a new product can be done in a very similar way.

If you have studied agile software development or lean business management, you are probably familiar with the PDCA cycle.

PDCA is adapted from the scientific method introduced by Francis Bacon (Novum Organum, 1620), which is summarized in English as “hypothesis – experiment – evaluation”.

Maybe Kolb’s cycle wasn’t quite so ground breaking as he is given credit for. My question is this. Why have we continued to focus so much of our classroom time on lecturing and testing? There seems to be a real disconnect. As infants and as adults we learn through experiences but through our childhood we are forced to learn by lectures and memorization with testing (regurgitation) as the assessment. Even a lot of adult education takes this same approach. It just doesn’t make much sense.

My son taught me an incredible lesson about experiential learning from games. I call it “fearless learning”. He understood that “dying” in a game can be a strategy for learning. He would charge fearlessly into battle. When I asked him why he was so eager to run right out in front of the enemy and die, he looked surprised. He said, “now I know where they are, so I can beat them next time”. In the game industry and agile software development, we call that “fail fast, fail cheap”. I can only imagine how much more we would learn in school as kids if there wasn’t such a negative stigma put on failing. I’m reminded of the famous quote from Thomas Edison: “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” That is experiential learning.

So, as we look for ways to innovate in education, I suggest that we don’t need clever or “ground breaking” solutions. We need to create more interactive experiences, and allow students to experiment rapidly; accepting that failure is an expected and celebrated part of the process. We coach teams and businesses to be more agile. Let’s be more agile in the classroom too, so our students are better prepared to take what they’ve learned through experience into the real world.