Kolb’s learning cycle
At collaboratio helvetica we believe in catalysing change by bringing people together and sharing an inner and outer exploratory journey, as a necessary preparation for collective action. What happens in such a collective space, like a Social Innovation Lab?
What takes place in such spaces, including the Catalyst Lab itself, is individual and collective learning. But what is learning, and how can we create and cultivate an environment where it can take place?
“Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (Kolb, 1984, p. 38).
David Allen Kolb, an American educational theorist, developed a framework that describes the four stages of learning, which he visualised as a spiral, as a continuous flow. Kolb’s experiential learning cycle makes tangible not only the process through which experiences become abstract knowledge and vice versa, but also at which point, depending on our personal strengths and preferences, we step into this cycle.
The learning cycle involves four stages: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization and active experimentation. Kolb’s proposition is that in order for an experience or a concept to be learned, people need to move through the entire cycle, no matter where they enter it initially.
The way how we apply the learning cycle in the Catalyst Lab is diverse. We certainly do not present it as a piece of theory they need to learn. Rather, the facilitators craft the learning space in a way that enables everyone to go through this cycle, no matter how they learn and where they are in their own process.
In the Catalyst Lab, we flow through the cycle in the following way:
ABSTRACT CONCEPTUALISATION: We often present abstract conceptual frameworks to offer catalysts a vocabulary to describe their diverse experiences - inner and outer.
ACTIVE EXPERIMENTING: We ask participants to try out new concepts in some kind of activity, either within the module or afterwards.
CONCRETE EXPERIENCE: We create experiences for the Catalysts within the framework of a module, supply them with tools and an invitation to craft their own experiences outside of the modules, and sometimes we invite them to share their own experiences in a smaller group.
REFLECTIVE OBSERVATION: Then we invite participants to reflect on these experiences, either in their diary, in the next module (or both), or with their Learning Companions and/or peers.
List of connected topics
Learning Ecology
Learning Organisations
Social Innovation Lab
Dialogue
References:
Katalin Hausel is responsible for organisational health and evaluation at collaboratio helvetica. She has gained three Masters degrees over the years. Katalin has a past in writing code, making and teaching art, working on rural regeneration and social cohesion projects, building IT tools, designing learning and evaluation tools, developing learning and evaluation solutions, working on new forms of collaboration and generally putting her mind to complex situations and finding a way through. Lately, she has been focusing on developing a framework for social innovation initiatives to use observation and organisational learning as a project evaluation methodology instead of predefining objectives. As a dedicated discipline-roamer and paradigm-shifter, she has been exploring how to craft situations, tools and spaces for transformation and learning to support systemic change and the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).