Every baby starts their journey of learning in their mother’s womb. After coming into this world the child learns different things through feeling, touching, sensing, and experiencing different things. Experimental learning starts from the time when the child touches any object, feels it, and learn about it. He feels the texture, state, smell or taste of anything, and record all of this information in his memory. The child psychologist says that whatever a child experience within his first five years of life would build up their permanent and long-term memory. These first five years of any child’s life, whether spent the days with mothers, babysitters or in kindergarten. By the passage of time, he refines his learning skills through exploration and investigation.
The dilemma of today’s most of the education system is that, as the child starts his formal school education, from grade one his exploration urge has limited to only textbooks or class assignments prescribed by the teacher, left him with so many questions unanswered. The vacuum of the unwanted questions drastically effects on child personality building, and as a teenager, or as a young man he would suffer the personality glitches.
Life coaches upon screening their clients found out that most of the times, these personality glitches are in the form of non-directional goals of life. John Dewey a famous educational reformer promoted the idea of project-based learning as “learning by doing”. Furthermore, for incorporating experimental learning other life coaches suggested the following steps to follow:
- Support and help children to explore the real world challenges actively.
- Involve the children in day-to-day solution-based activities at home such as repairing any utensil, woodwork, cooking etc.
- Encourage children to ask and help them to find out an answer by them self through exploration. (Please do not only confine them to “google it” the topic).
- When selecting toys for children, try to bring some instructional toys such as the repair kit tools or kitchen utensils etc.
- Ask for guidance from mentors and life coaches to set directional goals of life, and this should be done on each stage of children lives.
Benefits of experimental learning:
The benefits of experimental learning included but not limited to the greater depth of understanding of concepts, broader knowledge base, improved communication and interpersonal/social skills, enhanced leadership skills, increased creativity, and improved writing skills.
Reference:
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform.