Reclaiming Experiential Learning

Staying with Tension, Resisting Closure

Experiential learning has long been celebrated as a powerful framework for professional growth. David Kolb’s well-known cycle - Concrete Experience, Reflective Observation, Abstract Conceptualisation, Active Experimentation - offers a robust framework for understanding how knowledge emerges through action. It translates something complex and deeply human into a structure we can name, revisit, and refine.

And yet, in early childhood practice, I notice how readily we move toward closure and celebrate outcomes.

The tension within experiential learning is real. So too is the temptation to reduce it to a tidy diagram or a simplified process. We often talk about reflection. We refer to experimentation all the time. We nod to theory, link it and reference it....BUT meanwhile, the slow, relational, time-intensive work of actually living the cycle can quietly slip from day-to-day practice.

When experiential learning becomes something we intellectualise rather than embody, it begins to lose its transformative edge.

Staying with this tension asks something of us. It asks us to resist premature certainty and this is not simply an individual stance or personal quality right, its something that must become a collective exchange amongst a teaching team - one that requires trust, sensitivity, vulnerability, and persistence.

We also know that learning does not unfold in neat and tidy stages. We get that intellectually yet so many of our systems just reinforce tight cycles, limited time and simplied outcomes for children. Learning emerges in the unpredictable encounters between children, materials, educators, and ideas. New pedagogical practice does not take root after a single inspiring professional development session. It grows through putting ideas into practice within your own context, alongside your team and community. It must be pressure-tested - reshaped and refined - so that it fits your setting and aligns with your pedagogical philosophy.

The risk so often at the forefront is that we implement before we truly experiment.

We finalise before we have fully understood.

In doing so, we trade depth for easy outcomes.

Experiential learning demands more than intellectual understanding. It requires a willingness to get things wrong. To sit in disagreement. To remain with uncertainty long enough for new insights to surface. It requires protected time and leadership that safeguards inquiry rather than rushing results - recognising that, in the long term, what is being shaped is not just practice, but an educator’s and a team’s disposition to THINK.

Learning that transforms us is rarely efficient.

It is built through tension, persistence, and the courage to stay (OK so now I am running the risk of sounding like Brene Brown! lol).

Want to read about a year long process of thinking about the practice of 'graduation' and the transformation to 'celebration' - this reflects the qualities of experiential learning. Read our blog 'graduation or celebration'.

Here are 8 conditions for experiential learning to thrive?

If we want to reclaim experiential learning as a living practice in our workplace culture, we must do more than understand it as a framework. We must protect the conditions that allow it to thrive. Staying with tension does not happen by accident. It is cultivated, intentionally and collectively.

Reflect on these 8 conditions:

1. Protecting time for inquiry - Creating genuine space for thinking, reading, researching, and sustained dialogue within teams. When we are learning something new, it takes longer. We often need to design new systems for gathering information, preparing thoughtfully, and reflecting deeply. Inquiry cannot be squeezed into the margins.

   RESIST: Normalising minimal planning time as sufficient for deep thinking. Accepting that meaningful dialogue can happen when teams rarely have protected space to meet.

2. Modelling a learning stance - Sharing your own uncertainties, reflections, and revisions. Allowing educators to see you thinking aloud, adjusting your position, and learning alongside them. Leadership that models vulnerability gives others permission to do the same.

   RESIST: always being certain, knowing everything, not changing your mind or sharing this with others when you do.

3. Designing for return - Revisiting the same idea across multiple terms -or even years. Depth is not built through novelty. It grows through thoughtful repetition and the willingness to encounter the same question from a new place of understanding.

   RESIST: Chasing every new idea. Adopting what is shiny without discernment. Assuming shared understanding without revisiting it.

4. Building psychological safety - Creating an environment where questioning practice, trialling new strategies, and acknowledging missteps are genuinely welcomed. Nurturing the team’s emotional intelligence -the capacity to regulate, to listen deeply, and to respond with respect -so that disagreement becomes generative rather than divisive.

   RESIST: Staying in the comfortable. Valuing agreement over honest challenge. Withholding your perspective to avoid tension.

5. Using coaching as dialogue - Framing conversations around open-ended inquiry rather than evaluative checklists. Asking, “What are we noticing?” instead of “Have we completed this?” Allowing space for winding conversations that act as springboards for thinking, trusting that ideas need time to linger and then germinate.

   RESIST: Telling instead of listening. Steering conversations toward your own agenda. Reducing professional dialogue to quick, superficial exchanges.

6. Documenting thinking - Capturing shifts in understanding, tensions encountered, and insights gained - not only finished plans or visible achievements. When you read your walls, planning documents, and children’s records, do you notice evidence of thinking? Where might the edges of knowing be softened?

   RESIST: Prioritising tidy outcomes. Recording the obvious. Documenting children’s learning while leaving your own thinking invisible.

7. Inviting theory into the room - Holding theory as a companion in dialogue. Contesting it. Disagreeing with it. Wrestling with ideas, approaches, and models we encounter. Theory is not authority to be applied uncritically, but a set of tools we can think with.

   RESIST: Copy-and-pasting theory to justify practice. Linking it only to outcomes. Agreeing without questioning.

8. Honouring slow impact - Recognising that deep pedagogical change is measured in years, not weeks. Naming this openly so sustained effort is valued. Designing evaluation cycles that honour the time required to learn, unlearn, and relearn is not indulgent, it is a professional right.

   RESIST: Compressing reflection into fast cycles. Measuring growth only by what is easy or immediately visible.

To reclaim experiential learning is to reclaim the right to think deeply about our work.

It is not about adding more to our plates, but about strengthening our professional courage and the conditions and systems we wrap around out teaching teams.

Experiential Learning asks us to trust that depth takes time, that discomfort is generative, and that unfinished thinking is not a weakness but a sign of growth. When we stay with the tension - together - we create spaces where educators do not simply borrow or copy ideas, but interpret them, wrestle with them, and engage in genuine meaning-making ... AND ... that is where real transformation begins.

Love to hear your thoughts or reflections?

Kelly Goodsir