Experiential education programmes for students
Experiential learning camps are designed to encourage students to analyse their own behaviour and actively learn more from it. They arrive at an understanding of the process by which humans learn from their experiences, or the experiential learning cycle, which is an unending spiral of doing, reflecting, analysing and planning for the next action. They see how we do it all the time, whether consciously, or unconsciously, and how knowing this can help them understand themselves an plan their actions in a better way.
We put participants through different activities. These activities are essentially presented as games with a goal, or a challenge which serves as an objective measure of the result of behaviour. Their performance in these games is reviewed through a group discussion, where participants are encouraged to identify behaviour that helped their results and vice versa. They are guided to find solutions that can help them strengthen behaviour that gives desirable results and figure out ways of changing behaviour leading to undesirable results, or at least find ways of controlling it in a way that stops it from affecting their goal adversely.
This planning for action is then tested in the next activities to see the change in results that it can bring. The results are again reviewed in group discussiong, where participants can judge for themselves their success in causing a change, or fine tune methods from the previous discussions, based on how well they worked out.
This is about experience actively guiding our actions and such programmes are very successful in developing individuality, initiative, motivation, leadership skills, discipline, co-operation, etc through self-learning, which leads to more effective outcomes than learning through external guidance.