There's No Substitute for Experience: Experiential Learning for Homeschoolers

EP173: Listen in as Jean recounts the evolution of her family's home education journey that began in the 1990s and be inspired to see how a hands-on approach to learning can awaken a child's passion for discovery. Traditional textbooks can take a backseat to immersive educational philosophies like Montessori and Waldorf. From Aristotle's age-old wisdom to current research, join us as we explore the essence of learning by doing and the undeniable benefits of experiential education for homeschoolers.

Find the Show Notes Here (www.artofhomeschooling.com/episode173)

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Chapters

• 0:09 Experiential Education in Homeschooling
• 16:58 Invitation to Join Taproot Team

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:09

You're listening to the Art of Homeschooling podcast, where we help parents cultivate creativity and connection at home. I'm your host, jean Miller, and here on this podcast you'll find stories and inspiration to bring you the confidence you need to make homeschooling work for your family. Let's begin. You ever wonder about educational philosophy and how it has informed your decision to homeschool. I've actually thought about this a lot, and here's what that sounds like. We decided in our family to homeschool way back in the 1990s because we wanted our kiddos to be able to learn in a hands-on, experiential way. My husband, brian, and I even wrote about this in a family vision statement that we composed at the beginning of our homeschooling journey to ground us in our values in those values particularly so in describing our role as homeschool teachers. We wrote that our job involved creating an environment rich in learning tools and experiences, exposing our children to a variety of ideas, serving as resource people like librarians and fellow explorers, and fostering a love of learning. So today on the podcast we're talking all about one aspect of this vision statement we wrote, and that is how there's no substitute for experience. You can hear more about our family's vision for homeschooling back in episode four here on the podcast why Are we Homeschooling and how to Write your Family Vision. In that episode I shared details of that one pager. We wrote about what inspired us to take the leap into homeschooling and if you're interested, you can check it out at artofhomeschoolingcom.

Speaker 1: 2:27

After my own public school experiences, as well as my graduate school studies in education, I had the sense that I wanted a hands-on, holistic and experiential homeschooling environment for our children, and what a joy it was to discover that there's actually research to back this up. Yes, it's true, children learn better when they're engaged as active learners rather than being passive learners. Back when I was in grad school, I came across an organization called the Association for Experiential Learning and was fascinated. Here's their definition of experiential learning, and this is a quote. Experiential education is a teaching philosophy that informs many methodologies in which educators purposefully engage with learners in direct experience and focused reflection in order to increase knowledge, develop skills, clarify values and develop people's capacity to contribute to their communities. Isn't this a great description for our aims as homeschoolers to engage our children in direct experiences in order for them to develop skills, clarify their values and develop their capacities to contribute to both their families and their communities. And to me, the homeschool setting is so perfectly suited to this type of teaching and learning, even more so, perhaps, than a classroom where one teacher is working with many students, a large group of students. I'll be sure to link to the Association for Experiential Learning, to their website, in the show notes for this episode, where you can see a great visual that they have, showing how this hands-on form of learning begins with a concrete experience like an adventure, a challenge or a hands-on activity.

Speaker 1: 4:44

As we all know, the learning environment and hands-on activities are important aspects of the learning process, and experiential learning is informed by a philosophy of education that values experience as critical to learning, rather than just rote learning, for example, such as memorization or direct instruction like a lecture alone. We want to couple experiences with these other ways children learn. So, quite literally, experiential learning is the process of making meaning from direct experience. This is according to educational theorist David Kolb, and this approach actually goes all the way back to ancient times. Aristotle said, quote for the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, end quote. And here's another quote from Benjamin Franklin Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I may remember. Involve me and I learn. There are so many more quotes from thinkers throughout history Confucius, julius Caesar and Albert Einstein among them about how experience is really the best way to learn. That's what we can offer with homeschooling helping our children learn by doing, involving them, so that they are engaged and can better understand and remember what they're learning. There are lots of educational approaches that would fit the description of experiential education, both Waldorf and Montessori among them. Here's a little story of my own journey with some of these ideas.

Speaker 1: 6:39

When I was in grad school for my Master of Arts in Teaching in the 1980s, montessori schools were mentioned really only briefly, but they were mentioned during my studies, but no other alternative methods came up at all. After graduation, I taught high school English in a public school and was so discouraged by the lack of what I might call creative spark in my high school juniors and seniors that after one year I left and decided I needed to go back to the beginning and figure out how and where, when that spark had disappeared in children. I wanted to work with younger children and see what that creative spark looked like in the earlier years. Now remember this is all before I had any children of my own. So at that time the only experiential, hands-on approach I knew of was Montessori. So off I went to work as an assistant in a Montessori three to six-year-old classroom with my graduate degree in hand. I learned a lot that year and was incredibly exhausted at the end of every day. A few years later, when I was pregnant with our first child, my husband and I were sales reps for a friend of ours who made beautiful handmade Montessori materials. In our travels we visited many Montessori schools and I loved the natural materials, but I continued to have questions about the method, especially where young children were concerned. At the same time we had some friends who lived on a farm in rural Tennessee who used rather loosely an Oak Meadow curriculum to homeschool their nine children. Oak Meadow publishes curricula influenced, I would say, by Waldorf methods, and so my investigation into Waldorf began. I fell in love with the Waldorf approach and was inspired by this approach throughout our homeschooling journey of 25-plus years.

Speaker 1: 8:56

I find it fascinating that both Maria Montessori and Rudolph Steiner developed their educational methods around the same time. Montessori was an Italian medical doctor. She was one of the first female doctors in Italy who opened the first House of Children, or Casa De Bambini in 1907 in the city of Rome. She developed her method based on scientific observations of children with mental disabilities, initially, and later by observing children from low-income families. Rudolph Steiner was a German philosopher and educator who founded the First Waldorf School in Stuttgart, germany, in 1919 for the children of the factory workers at the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory.

Speaker 1: 9:48

So both the Montessori and Waldorf approaches or methods were developed in response to the mainstream practice at the time of industrialized schooling. So it's the early 1900s, and by this phrase industrialized schooling, I'm referring to the practice of identifying at a very young age the occupation that a child would or should pursue and then training them solely for that occupation. In contrast, the founders of Waldorf and Montessori approaches each felt strongly that all children deserve a complete education, a well-rounded education. So each of these founders developed a liberal arts approach that was very respectful of the whole child. Most of all, both Steiner and Montessori believed that the hands-on activities children participate in can help spark their interests and engage all aspects of their being, and so this is something they have in common, this devotion to experiential learning.

Speaker 1: 10:58

All right, so let's switch gears. Why does experiential education work? Why is there no substitute for experience? Because hands-on experiences lay the foundation on which to build understanding. So when coaching homeschooling parents, I often put it this way Think of the experience before the explanation. That's what we want to offer to our children, and this simply means that we allow our children to have an experience before we explain how or why something works the way that it does, so that they can ground their understanding in the experience itself.

Speaker 1: 11:41

And if you want research to back this up, in July of 2019, the Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education published a meta-analysis examining over 13,000 articles and studies about experiential learning and concluded that and this is a quote from the study students experienced superior learning outcomes when experiential pedagogies were employed. Further, learning outcomes were almost a half-standard deviation higher in classes employing experiential learning pedagogies versus traditional learning environments. This review definitively and quantitatively shows the importance of experiential learning activities". End quote. I'll be sure to link to this article in the show notes for this episode. One of the main findings of this study was that children remember more when they experience something, rather than relying on what's called semantic memory, which just means learning from something they've heard in a lecture right, or something someone explains to them.

Speaker 1: 12:56

The outcomes described in this study remind me of Rudolf Steiner's description of the lively arts. Steiner said that the lively arts bring us joy as human beings and help make the learning more memorable, and that my friend can explain why the Waldorf method so successfully builds lessons around story, music, poetry, drama, painting, drawing, modeling and movement All those lively arts because these experiences allow children to engage more actively with the subject or topic and to remember the learning more readily as a result. Now I want to take a moment here to talk about the differences between inquiry or discovery learning and experiential learning. Inquiry and discovery learning both allow for the child to explore what interests them and figure things out on their own by following their curiosity. On the other hand, experiential learning activities are set by the teacher or parent with a particular purpose in mind. I'll link to a really helpful article on the SEEDS network called Exploring Learning Theories Discovery Learning, which describes one of the differences like this With experiential learning, the skill or knowledge to be learned is defined up front.

Speaker 1: 14:32

Of course, I think there's a place for inquiry or discovery learning and experiential learning, but what I want you to take away from this episode is that, like I said in the beginning, there's really no substitute for experience. That's what lays the strong foundation for understanding that comes after the experience. The distinction I like to make for homeschoolers is that during the main lesson time that we plan for, we're focusing on experiential learning. Then our children can have other times of the day when they're naturally engaged in discovery learning, for example, or learning that allows them to follow their own interests. I love that.

Speaker 1: 15:20

Experiential learning is all about helping children build a knowledge of the world, which is exactly the focus of the current movement in teaching children to read. As a matter of fact, specifically, educator Natalie Wexler's work focuses on knowledge building as a critical component to reading comprehension. Hands-on experiences help strengthen a child's knowledge of the world and help build connections in the brain for future learning and understanding, and this all supports the idea here in this episode that there's no substitute for experience. I might add that adults learn best through experience as well. That's why every summer I host the Taproot teacher training for homeschooling parents in person over a long weekend. Experiencing the lessons during hands-on workshops is invaluable for parents to learn how to create creative lessons at home and take these ideas home to their children.

Speaker 1: 16:26

One past participant put it so beautifully when she said Prior to Taproot. I read so many books and curricula about this method, but the way that I was educated growing up was stuck in me and creating a barrier to understanding and feeling the magic that I wanted to bring to my child. Now I feel like I get it, like it's alive inside of me. What a blessing this truly is the power of gathering in person and hands-on experiences.

Speaker 1: 16:58

The Taproot team and I would love to have you join us, and I'll be sure to link to more information about Taproot in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope this episode has you thinking about why you choose to do what you do with your children. You can find the show notes for this episode with links to everything that I've mentioned here over at artofhomeschoolingcom slash episode 173. That's all for today, my friend, but here's what I want you to remember Rather than perfection, let's focus on connection. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you on the next episode of the Art of Homeschooling podcast.