Hi Neil,

Experiential learning through simulations is advisable in several fields. Worry-free scenarios in which learners or participants interact and arrive to important decisions + debriefing of the experience bring about powerful insights on the specific subjectmatter and themselves.

take a look at the sites below to learn more about simulations and structure. Then you can design your own scenarios to fit your area.

Hope it helps,

Laura

http://www.icons.umd.edu/education/home

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/M_Laura_Angelini

Many thanks Laura, I shall take a look at those sites.

Neil

The experiential learning cycle was developed in conjunction with action research inquiry and learning by organizations.  Soft Systems Methodology is a rigorous, yet informal inquiry system through which organizations can use experiential learning cycles to understand and make desirable and feasible changes to improve situations.  SSM is about 40 years old, so there is a fair amount of research and theory.  "Soft Systems Methodology in Action" by Peter Checkland and Jim Scholes is a good beginning text.

Peter Senge and the Society for Organizational Learning are also leaders in the field of using experiential learning within organizations.  Senge and SOL champion a shift from industrial thinking to ecological systems thinking and ways to use open ended systems thinking to guide organizations to envision and move toward transforming actions that improve organizations and problem situations.

Finally, there is an entire field - Experiential Learning - that works with experiential learning with organizations - from primarily modernist or postmodernist perspectives.  Portions of this field have been critical of the experiential learning cycle.  The experiential learning cycles by Kolb and others can be applied too simplistically and as an individual learning style abstracted from context or organization.  

I work as an urban ecologist and restoration ecologist teaching within an urban university.  I also am involved in a project evaluating a program with a hospital system that used SSM inquiry to change an outreach health education course.  To overcome the objections of researchers who have been critical of experiential learning cycles, I am convinced that experiential educators must move from industrial, modernist thinking based on individualism and mechanism and move to organic/ecological/evolutionary thinking where individuals are persons-in-community and organism-within-ecosystems are the root metaphors.  Then SSM or SOL's forms of experiential organizational learning make sense and work.

Thanks James - interesting stuff!  Great subjects for me to develop my research on.

Neil

Ha, what a question! As you can see from the answers, many directions to go.

Not being sure of your context it is difficult to make suggestions. However I do have extensive experience in applying the Kolb model for adult experiential learning as an experiential process in organisations and in training groups. I use a concretisation of the model in a group setting followed by having participants work out their learning preferences and then get into same-style groups. This may, of itself, produce surprising results. The main focus I then use is for participants to get to know the visceral feelings that emerge when they have to listen to or work with people who have a different learning style to them. Most folks act as though learning is in the lap of the gods. When they get to know their preferences, they then believe that their preferences are given by god. And by corollary all the other learning styles are given by the devil to make their life difficult. So this effectively becomes a positive means for highlighting the negative stereotyping organisational folks have around people who learning differently to them, or are different in other ways.

Such fun.

Cheers

Peter

 Thanks Peter. I'm, glad that I have asked a valid question!! 

Some context. In the undertaking of an emergency exercise (simply, a simulation of a real emergency for the purposes of training, testing procedure or equipment).  Let's say that the scenario for the simulation is a multiple vehicle car accident. Learning can occur at the individual level (how to undertake a task such as put a fire out), group/team/inter-organisational level (how to work together to achieve a shared goal, such as remove a casualty from a wrecked car) or organisational level (which procedures work and which do not, and therefore require modification such as the procedure for dealing with the fire or communications protocols).  

The organisation is important in this field. It sets the aims of incident response and the procedures are organisational procedures.  Training is provided by the organisation.  Any learning from the exercise must be implemented by the organisation i.e. culture and support to change the things that need to be improved.

I am developing a viewpoint that the exercise provides the organisation the opportunity to actively experiment with different procedures in an attempt to determine the most effective way of dealing with that type emergency.  

However, I am not yet in possession of any evidence that really supports that viewpoint!