What do you think?
Rate this book
A Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning
This handbook acts as an essential guide to understanding and using reflective and experiential learning - whether it be for personal or professional development, or as a tool for learning.
It takes a fresh look at experiential and reflective learning, locating them within an overall theoretical framework for learning and exploring the relationships between different approaches.
As well as the theory, the book provides practical ideas for applying the models of learning, with tools, activities and photocopiable resources which can be incorporated directly into classroom practice.
This book is essential reading to guide any teacher, lecturer or trainer wanting to improve teaching and learning.
It takes a fresh look at experiential and reflective learning, locating them within an overall theoretical framework for learning and exploring the relationships between different approaches.
As well as the theory, the book provides practical ideas for applying the models of learning, with tools, activities and photocopiable resources which can be incorporated directly into classroom practice.
This book is essential reading to guide any teacher, lecturer or trainer wanting to improve teaching and learning.
264 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 2004
3 people are currently reading
49 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 23, 2016
The United World Colleges offer a rich experiential education based on deliberate diversity, civic engagement and service; this text provides a useful lens through which to think about 'what's the learning?' when the learning itself lies within a rich mesh of lived communal experience and where 'outcomes' may be more or less defined.
Moon's text is very useful in offering an overview of ways in which both 'reflection' and 'experiential learning' share some key features around the way in which existing understanding confronts variations and 'accommodates' cognitive structures accordingly.
Moon identifies situations where learning is 'ill structured' and there is a particular complexity of establishing 'frames of reference' as the most obvious domain of experiential or reflective learning.
She usefully distinguishes types of variation a learner might experience:
1. A change in the external experience of a given phenomenon (what she calls the 'material of learning')
2. Change in frame of reference used to perceive the material of learning (i.e. seeing it from a new perspective, or observing it in a different way)
3. 'Cognitive housekeeping' i.e. working on our internal representations of the material of learning and making connections and forming insights that are new, despite no new experiences.
4. Representing the material of learning to others, and therefore gaining new insights into the learning material during the process of communicating it. (very similar to Reggio's idea of 100 languages expressing and constructing understanding).
Looked at through this lens, the importance of diversity within UWCs could be understood as deliberate variation of the learners' experiences of human culture, belief and practices in order to shape their mental models and capacity for empathy with the range of human behaviour and values.
Moon also provides a taxonomy of learning approaches from those surface approaches which see learning in terms of absolutes, and deep learning that seeks to understand causation, perspective and context. Concept based learning seems a tacit concept here which is not developed.
She typifies experiential learning as a situation in which the learning material is encountered in a relatively unmediated form; and she typifies teaching as the act of mediating and simplifying the frame of reference of the learning material. That is a quite useful distinction, as well as the more obvious 'holistic' aspects of experiential education, and the stance of 'entanglement' that she does not explore.
She provides a very good overview of other writing on experiential and reflective learning, including Kolb's experiential learning cycle.
The resources at the back are very useful, and the suggested activities are practical. UWCSEA's reflection model I think is simpler and more effective than Moon's model, but her rich contextual understanding of the way that reflection and experiential learning are related is very valuable and worth a read.
Moon's text is very useful in offering an overview of ways in which both 'reflection' and 'experiential learning' share some key features around the way in which existing understanding confronts variations and 'accommodates' cognitive structures accordingly.
Moon identifies situations where learning is 'ill structured' and there is a particular complexity of establishing 'frames of reference' as the most obvious domain of experiential or reflective learning.
She usefully distinguishes types of variation a learner might experience:
1. A change in the external experience of a given phenomenon (what she calls the 'material of learning')
2. Change in frame of reference used to perceive the material of learning (i.e. seeing it from a new perspective, or observing it in a different way)
3. 'Cognitive housekeeping' i.e. working on our internal representations of the material of learning and making connections and forming insights that are new, despite no new experiences.
4. Representing the material of learning to others, and therefore gaining new insights into the learning material during the process of communicating it. (very similar to Reggio's idea of 100 languages expressing and constructing understanding).
Looked at through this lens, the importance of diversity within UWCs could be understood as deliberate variation of the learners' experiences of human culture, belief and practices in order to shape their mental models and capacity for empathy with the range of human behaviour and values.
Moon also provides a taxonomy of learning approaches from those surface approaches which see learning in terms of absolutes, and deep learning that seeks to understand causation, perspective and context. Concept based learning seems a tacit concept here which is not developed.
She typifies experiential learning as a situation in which the learning material is encountered in a relatively unmediated form; and she typifies teaching as the act of mediating and simplifying the frame of reference of the learning material. That is a quite useful distinction, as well as the more obvious 'holistic' aspects of experiential education, and the stance of 'entanglement' that she does not explore.
She provides a very good overview of other writing on experiential and reflective learning, including Kolb's experiential learning cycle.
The resources at the back are very useful, and the suggested activities are practical. UWCSEA's reflection model I think is simpler and more effective than Moon's model, but her rich contextual understanding of the way that reflection and experiential learning are related is very valuable and worth a read.
Displaying 1 of 1 review