Experiential learning (or PBL) is essential for fostering knowledge. Coined by John Dewey in the early 1900s, experiential learning is hands-on, learning by doing, and reflecting on what one has done. Reflection includes growth from failure and documentation of what’s been learned.

Strong elements of experiential learning include students having voice and choice in what they do (beyond contrived faux choices; for example, a poster or paper), connecting with the community, and projects with real-world value. Experiential learning mirrors what actual people do and, if possible, is simply what one does (not a fake assignment, but an actual end product with value.) It is not learning, then doing: it is learning while doing.

Primer: Progressive Education | Human Restoration Project | Free Resources

Dewey believed in the power of children to make learning choices as they worked together in experiential activities designed for meaningful scaffolding of child‐centered context and knowledge building through home and community skillfulness. Dewey’s work was amplified through architectural design work and experiential education exemplified by the Crowe Island School near Chicago and in more progressive communities across the United States (Mortice 2015).

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

We want experiential learning grounded in the curiosity and interests of learners to be integral to our systems work, not something that happens randomly in an occasional teacher’s class.

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

Maker work is more than project‐based learning; it is more than problem‐based learning. It is, in Chad’s words, “when we add content to student‐created context,” and it is central to true change because it switches the power to define the school experience from the teacher to the learner.

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

Experiential learning is project, passion, purpose, and problem based.

Students should not play life, or study it merely while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

Thoreau 1893, p. 82

“It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about. … When students are emotionally engaged … we see activations all around the cortex, in regions involved in cognition, memory and meaning-making, and even all the way down into the brain stem.”

Mary-Helen Immordino-Yang, a professor of education, psychology & neuroscience at USC, from the article, ‘To Help Students Learn, Engage the Emotions.’

Project

Forty-six effect sizes (comparisons) extracted from 30 eligible journal articles published from 1998 to 2017 were analyzed, representing 12,585 students from 189 schools in nine countries. The results showed that the overall mean weighted effect size (d+) was 0.71, indicating that project-based learning has a medium to large positive effect on students’ academic achievement compared with traditional instruction.

Revisiting the effects of project-based learning on students’ academic achievement: A meta-analysis investigating moderators – Consensus

Making to learn and learning to make can go in many different directions because the work is developed in the context of what children want to make. The path they take begins to drive their own connections to content they need to map to their learning. We see kids all the time who find learning becomes important to them through their maker work and that content suddenly starts to make sense. In doing so, they naturally experience social‐emotional learning through empathetic design and collaboration with peers and experts.

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

The students talk about the difference that experiential learning in makerspaces, music construction and media studios, the teams’ labs, and the library makes to their commitment to staying in school. They engage in work that leaves them with a sense of accomplishment as they design, invent, discuss, make, connect, and share their learning collaboratively and individually. In fact, they report a very different story of school than students nationally report in the Gallup survey. As Devon,* one member of a team of high school students who built a tiny house together shared, “Last year I would get my parents to pick me up early from school any chance I could. I hated coming to school. This year, I come every day because of this project. My team needs me to be here to work during and after school so I need to be here. And, this work matters to me.”

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

I feel like I’ve gotten to the point where I feel like content is secondary to enthusiasm and interest … so what I’ve evolved into, I’m purely project oriented now. We just go from one project to another. My students pick a topic of interest, research it, plan activities, and teach a lesson to elementary children. Before that we did Rube Goldberg mouse traps to illustrate energy changes and energy transfers … that room was a mess. I had my band saw in there and my drills, it looked like a shop.

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

So I want to divide the Middle School Grades—6, 7, 8—into 9 large, and 3 “mini” project‐based experiences. Project‐based experiences that kids choose, completely interdisciplinary experiences. Kids would pick three 10‐week experiences and one shorter experience for each year, and that is what they would do all day. Teams of teachers would join together to offer these options. It could range from building a Habitat for Humanity house to making videos to putting on The Oresteia. Or you could be restoring a 1959 Studebaker, writing scripts for vampire movies, or studying the planets. In every one, you can easily include language, history, math, sciences, foreign languages, physical exercise, music, art. (Socol 2011)

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

We believe educators must do exactly what Bell, GE, Lockheed Martin, and NASA did when they took on the grand challenge to invent something that didn’t exist. Look inside the organization and find and protect people who have a creative quotient that is off the scale. Build school laboratories where creative teams know the leaders have their back and they are charged to leverage the resources of the organization to create prototypes that begin in the future, not the present or the past. Think like the best inventors who ever existed because they didn’t work to build the next dead reckoning step but to build beyond a horizon that can’t be seen. Why not begin building ideas beyond the edges of the universe? Our profession is filled with history’s stories of pathfinders and wayfarers who have done just that. Why not educators, too?

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

However, teachers who get the chance to see what children who come with disabilities, stressed family backgrounds, limited English language proficiency, and even high academic capabilities can do when we unleash them from the constraints of school begin to see that they too can change the parameters inside their classes during the regular school year to incorporate more choice, more P‐base learning (projects, problems, and passion work), and more maker opportunities into their work with children.

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

Today, however, is very different. Now because of the Internet and its connectivity kids can find experts for whatever they need to do, and they can learn to interact with expert resources – museums, agencies, and research sources spanning the globe. Kids in our schools today initiate projects all the time that demand connectivity with expertise outside our community. For example, eighth‐grade girls watched a YouTube video about a high‐altitude balloon and decided they wanted to put one up as well. They worked with the teacher and recruited a team of eighth graders who planned and actually pulled off a high‐altitude balloon launch. It was a remarkable bit of engineering, math, and science. It was also language arts, geography, and civics. After the launch, the balloon vanished. The transponder stopped working right after the launch. One of our tech integrators who along with a science teacher were the adults supporting the middle schoolers said, “It was great because at least they didn’t get depressed.” They spent, he said, both in person and then online, the rest of that weekend figuring out what had gone wrong and what they would need to do differently next time. They had launched the balloon on a Saturday and the transponder had been silent all weekend. Then on Tuesday, they got a signal from it. It had landed in a tree on a farm almost exactly where they predicted it would land.

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

We believe in scaling great ideas, theories, and strategies across our schools rather than trying to scale up programs. Not everybody’s going to build a treehouse in the cafeteria as our kids did in one middle school. That was a school‐specific desire. A group of middle schoolers in another school decided to build a high‐altitude balloon apparatus and send it to the outer edges of the atmosphere. Not every middle school needs to do that. Some kids may decide to do something that seems less ambitious and build a nine‐hole Putt‐Putt golf course using cardboard. The projects, and the form of the learning environment, need to build on the passions, and build from the experiences, of both students and teachers.

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

Problem

When we’ve observed students in school creatively using a variety of technologies, designing and making, and working together on projects that challenge them to consider the needs of others as well as solve community problems, we notice that the social and academic curricula begin to merge and time fades as a construct of the schedule. Kids take work home and connect with peers outside of school to keep going on projects. They come in early, stay late, or use available time during the day to keep working. It’s why we’ve supported maker education, problem‐ and project‐based learning, comfort and choice, and technologies as interactive and connected tools of learning rather than as passive tools of teaching. If empowered agency is a goal for learners so they will thrive not just survive in their adult future, this kind of work must happen purposefully, not by chance.

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

Passion

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Howard Thurman

When life learning competencies come together through the creative juice of making or the passion‐based projects formed from deep interests, all of a sudden kids value communication in a different way than if they’re just expected to write to a writing prompt or respond to a multiple choice item. And, when learners can share their learning work and articulate coherently why it’s important to them, that’s worth its weight in gold.

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

He made it to graduation because he found a mentor with an “insurgent mission,” a teacher who chose to “upend the status quo” as he connected with kids to change what learning opportunities in high school could become (Zook 2016). In discovering his passion for writing and performing rap music in a school that made that not just okay but promoted it, Kolion found a reason to keep coming back to school every day to connect with peers, diverse teens united through their voices, agency, and influence in their school community. Indeed he found his way as a learner.

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

They know that motivated learners will continue to pursue their interests and passions across the vast wastelands of rote content learning that becomes increasingly irrelevant across time as we move farther from it.

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

When they are not engaged in what we want to them to learn, we need to question ourselves rather than blame them. When we are good at seeing children, we know that schools exist to serve the interests of children, not the other way around. Curricula exist to provide children opportunities to learn, not to limit their explorations. Standards exist to guide the development of learning opportunities for children, not to judge their worthiness.

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

As Yong Zhao so eloquently describes it, “It is precisely the lack of explicit objectives determined by external parties that fascinates children” (Zhao et al. 2015).

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

Purpose

How do we build learning environments that embrace intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose?

The Gift: LD/ADHD Reframed

Learning is rooted in purpose finding and community relevance.

“Primer: A Guide to Human Centric Education” by Human Restoration Project

Cultivate purpose-driven classrooms by promoting experiential learning & community connection.

Research supports what teachers intuitively understand: that students ask fewer questions the longer they remain in school and engagement steadily declines over time.

“Promoting curiosity in children, especially those from environments of economic disadvantage, may be an important, underrecognized way to address the achievement gap. Promoting curiosity is a foundation for early learning that we should be emphasizing more when we look at academic achievement.”

At the same time, rates of depression and anxiety have steadily increased to become among the most diagnosed mental health disorders in children. Kids who feel isolated from school and their community frequently drop out turn to self-harm and self-medication through alcohol and drugs.

Purpose-finding, on the other hand, has been linked to prosocial outcomes and healthier lifestyles, and is inherently tied to positive identity and self-worth. By directly participating in building a better society and reflecting on the experience, students gain valuable insight into their identity in relation to the world around them.

A Human-Centered Education: Cultivates Purpose-Driven Classrooms – YouTube

Purpose

1. An overarching life goal beyond an incremental step.
2. It looks at the world beyond the self.
3. It’s the ultimate concern.

100 Seconds to Midnight: The Need for a Human-Centered Education (Full Documentary) – YouTube

Purpose is defined as…

1. An overarching life goal beyond an incremental step, such aspassing a test or applying for college.
2. A part in one’s personal search for meaning, but not entirely focused on the self. Instead, purpose looks at the world beyond the self.
3. The “ultimate concern.” It is the definition of “Why do I care?” It is a reasoning beyond immediate goals and motives.

Stages of Purpose

1. Childhood: When a child is making sense of the world, the more self-generated achievement and purpose-driven actions one takes, the more ability they have to amplify their actions.
2. Adolescence: The formative period of purpose-finding, where soul-searching and experimentation should be encouraged.
3. Emerging Adulthood: When one’s path to purpose begins to be realized. This path is delayed by cynicism, apathy, anxiety, and “directionless drift”, where young people aren’t really sure where to go next.
4. Adulthood: When purpose is continually acted upon, or delayed, rejected, and/or never found. Sometimes this may be seen as a “midlife crisis.”

Path to Purpose Handbook | Human Restoration Project | Free Resources

The primary component of school should be for young people to find a path to purpose.

Purpose is discovered as a connection between three traits:

1. Understanding one’s abilities.
2. Seeing how these abilities can serve the world.
3. Feeling enjoyment by using these abilities in this way.

Path to Purpose Handbook | Human Restoration Project | Free Resources

Purpose
Unifies us:
It focuses our dreams,
Guides our plans,
Strengthens our efforts.
Purpose
Defines us,
Shapes us,
And offers us
Greatness.

Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

Unsanitized Places

When pursuing experiential learning, we need unsanitized places.

Sanitised places make it hard to be curious. With their reduction in diversity, there are fewer opportunities to be awed, stumped, challenged or enthused. The accidental fades from view, replaced by the intended … predictable … safe … trivial.

This is the year we must put care at the heart of education – Bevan Holloway

Further Reading