Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Ep 17: Introduction to Experiential Learning
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Ep 17: Introduction to Experiential Learning
This week marked my one-month anniversary of experimenting with teaching first-year students using the ideology that I have been putting forth with this podcast and the insights that I have gained hold tremendous value.
What if I were to tell you that when we learn biochemistry, you will also end up learning organic chemistry, plant and animal physiology, and even quantum physics? Have you ever had a class like this? What's going to be the exam pattern? Who knows?!
I think you can imagine the faces of my students when this conversation happened. Let me guide you through this entire process of these classes and you'll see what I mean. Whenever I conducted a class, it was limited to one hour where we covered two to three concepts and discussed them. After the class was done, I used to put up some trivia questions on chat for students to answer. They were expected to answer within 24 hours of the class ending and the format of the questions would be similar to the ones that would be asked during class. We connected each concept to allied concepts to explain every phenomenon.
They had a shocked expression on their faces when I conducted an assessment by asking them to attempt a test paper in 26 hours with complete access to the internet. Now, listeners, you may find this an interesting experiment and the outcomes were equally interesting.
In the 26-hour long test, no one could score above 80%. This doesn't say anything about their intelligence. Almost all of them lost marks due to a lack of understanding of the application of concepts. The following test was a group discussion. Now, recently, I took another group discussion assessment, and everyone fared great in it.
What did I achieve with this? I exploited the idea of "experiential learning" - Learning by experience. I always believe that to learn anything, you must experience it. As an educator, my job was to create such experiences. And so, I did. With this idea, I not only built their understanding of those concepts, but I also built allied skills, like logical reasoning, communication skills, research writing and more. This is the power of experiential learning.
Get full access to The Mihir Iyer Newsletter at mihiriyer.substack.com/subscribe
View all episodes
By The Art of LearningThis week marked my one-month anniversary of experimenting with teaching first-year students using the ideology that I have been putting forth with this podcast and the insights that I have gained hold tremendous value.
What if I were to tell you that when we learn biochemistry, you will also end up learning organic chemistry, plant and animal physiology, and even quantum physics? Have you ever had a class like this? What's going to be the exam pattern? Who knows?!
I think you can imagine the faces of my students when this conversation happened. Let me guide you through this entire process of these classes and you'll see what I mean. Whenever I conducted a class, it was limited to one hour where we covered two to three concepts and discussed them. After the class was done, I used to put up some trivia questions on chat for students to answer. They were expected to answer within 24 hours of the class ending and the format of the questions would be similar to the ones that would be asked during class. We connected each concept to allied concepts to explain every phenomenon.
They had a shocked expression on their faces when I conducted an assessment by asking them to attempt a test paper in 26 hours with complete access to the internet. Now, listeners, you may find this an interesting experiment and the outcomes were equally interesting.
In the 26-hour long test, no one could score above 80%. This doesn't say anything about their intelligence. Almost all of them lost marks due to a lack of understanding of the application of concepts. The following test was a group discussion. Now, recently, I took another group discussion assessment, and everyone fared great in it.
What did I achieve with this? I exploited the idea of "experiential learning" - Learning by experience. I always believe that to learn anything, you must experience it. As an educator, my job was to create such experiences. And so, I did. With this idea, I not only built their understanding of those concepts, but I also built allied skills, like logical reasoning, communication skills, research writing and more. This is the power of experiential learning.
Get full access to The Mihir Iyer Newsletter at mihiriyer.substack.com/subscribe