Learning from experience, as a cycle

In one line: we learn from experience by going round a loop: do something, look back on it, make sense of it, then try something new. Plan your teaching so people get round the whole loop.

What Kolb did

This isn’t an experiment. It’s a book that pulls together older ideas into one model of how adults learn from experience.

David Kolb was a professor of organisational behaviour in the USA, working mostly with managers and professionals. He drew on three earlier thinkers: John Dewey, Kurt Lewin and Jean Piaget. Each had said, in different ways, that people learn by doing and then thinking about what happened. Kolb joined their ideas into a single cycle with four stages.

The book also describes a questionnaire, the Learning Style Inventory, which sorts people by which stages they prefer. That part has been heavily criticised (see below).

What he argued

• Learning turns experience into knowledge. It isn’t just taking in information. It’s what happens when you make sense of something you’ve lived through.
• There are four stages. A concrete experience (doing something). Reflective observation (looking back: what happened?). Abstract conceptualisation (making sense: why, and what’s the general idea?). Active experimentation (trying it out somewhere new). Then round again.
• Skipping a stage weakens the loop. Experience without looking back can leave mistakes unnoticed. Theory without experience can stay as words people repeat but can’t use. Without trying it out, nothing changes in practice.
• People differ in which stages they lean towards. Kolb described four “learning styles” based on this. This is the part the evidence doesn’t support.

How much should you trust it?

A useful way to plan teaching; not a proven account of how people learn.

• It’s a model built from earlier theory and Kolb’s own work, not from experiments that tested it. It’s a description, not a mechanism.
• Real learning doesn’t always go round the stages in order, and the stages blur together. People also learn plenty from plain practice.
• The learning styles part has poor support. There’s little evidence that matching teaching to someone’s “style” helps them learn.
• It was developed with managers and professionals, not in classrooms or healthcare. Even so, the planning advice it gives fits well with other evidence, such as retrieval practice: people learn more when they actively do something with what they’ve met.

If you need to convince someone

In our words (a paraphrase, not a quotation): experience is the raw material, not the finished product. People learn most when they look back on what happened, make sense of it, and then try something new.

What it means for you

1. Try experience first, then the idea. Give people a short task or problem before you explain the theory. If experience comes first, the theory explains something they’ve just lived through. Some studies suggest this can help learning stick, especially when the theory follows straight after.
2. Build in time to look back. A quick “What surprised you?” after a task, a short debrief after a scenario, or two minutes at the end of a huddle. This is the stage busy settings skip.
3. Finish with something to try. Ask each person what they’ll do differently, and where. That’s how the learning gets back to the ward, the pharmacy or the clinic.
4. Teach the cycle, not the styles. Don’t sort people into styles. Everyone benefits from going round the whole loop.

How it appears in Teaching That Lands

Each session follows the cycle: an experience, a short reflection, the idea that explains it, then putting it to use. In Session 1, overload comes first, then working memory (how much we can hold in mind at once) and mental overload (cognitive load), then two rounds of redesigning a slide on paper (or on a laptop, for those comfortable with PowerPoint). In Session 2, a Kahoot and a Menti tour come first, then the strategies, then making ten minutes of their own session active. The Session 2 ask (play with Menti or Kahoot and make one thing) is active experimentation from the presenter’s side. In Session 3, the card sort comes before Kirkpatrick’s levels are named. Theory arrives in short bursts, just before it’s used.

The small print

• The famous quotation from the book is: “Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience.”
• The four learning styles were Diverger, Assimilator, Converger and Accommodator, each linked to two neighbouring stages. Reviews by Coffield et al. (2004) and Pashler et al. (2008) found poor evidence that styles are stable, or that matching teaching to them improves learning. Sadly, the styles often overshadow the cycle in staff training.
• Research on “problem first, then instruction” finds benefits only under some conditions, and the effects are modest. It doesn’t show that experience-first is better in every case.
• The cycle focuses on the individual. It says less about learning from and alongside other people, which Vygotsky and Lave and Wenger cover more fully.
• “Reflection” is easier to recommend than to do well. Writers such as Boud (2001) and Moon (1999) go well beyond what Kolb’s model says about it. See also Schön on reflecting during and after practice.
• A second edition of the book was published in 2015.