I'm Brian Myers. I'm Mike Ritalik. I'm Becky Hideoed. And this is Alpellentz, a podcast featuring tips for ad teachers.
We are your agricultural education resource across the web, sharing research based tips and tackling the tough questions facing agriculture teachers every day. Hey Alpellentz, welcome back. This is Brian here with Becky and Mike by the Alpellent. We have another great conversation with a motley crew of AgEd researchers and we are glad that they have joined us here today.
We've got Brad Coleman, JC Bunch and Grady Roberts. John and thank you for joining us today. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having us.
So to get things kicked off here, why don't we let you guys introduce yourselves? Brad, get us started. Can I tell everybody, reintroduce yourself because you're a return guest, which we are so excited to have people come back. So start with you and then we'll go around the horn.
Yeah, I guess you were just asking for trouble having me back again, huh? So my name is Brad Coleman. I'm originally from Louisiana, which is where I formerly taught high school agricultural education and I'm currently an assistant professor of agricultural education and leadership at Oklahoma State University. Yeah, hello everybody.
My name is JC Bunch. I'm an associate professor and graduate coordinator in the Department of Agriculture Education and Communication at the University of Florida. Hey everybody, I'm Grady Roberts. I'm a professor of agricultural education at the University of Florida and I'm a Florida ag teacher from Florida.
Outstanding. What a crew. So Brad, tell us a little bit. What's the general gist of our conversation today going to be around?
Yeah, so I hope everyone's stoked. I know I get pumped to talk about philosophy and sometimes I'm being a nice stoked. Is that one on the field? No.
By the way. Okay, but he's in your defense, like he is in like the second round of being able to say stoked. But second, so I'm around again. I got it.
Well, I know people get really jazzed to talk about. Oh, goodness. Sorry, Brad, these are not on the bingo card. They've got to be common phrases.
I think you had some squares to your card. But anyway, I don't think the bingo card, I just report the rules. But really what we're talking about today is experiential learning. And so we know it's used a lot in agricultural education.
And so just getting into a little bit of a philosophical conversation about, you know, what it is and also what it isn't. Maybe some life lessons from from our own experiences, teaching ag and then maybe some tips on how we can facilitate educated experiences in our classes. I think this is I really appreciate the work y'all did on this because, yeah, we do joke about philosophical pieces and whatever else. But we were talking about bingo cards.
I think one of the bingo cards I get is experiential learning. We're going to say that's what we do all the time. And I think probably most of us when we say we're doing experiential learning probably aren't. So tell us, tell us Brad a little bit about what what is experiential learning and what differentiates it from other other things that we do that are also good.
Just not experiential learning in the classroom. Sure. Yeah. And maybe I guess what I should start with is what it is.
And this is kind of where sometimes I start the conversation with some of my students and we're all to get ready to have all the air sucked out of the room. It's not or I like to say it's not hands on learning. And I say that with caution because maybe a better phrase is it's not only hands on learning. And so it can include hands on learning, which I did a whole lot of in the high school classroom, but it's a little bit more than that.
And so when we say we're implementing experiential learning as ag teachers, it should go beyond that. So for example, when I was teaching ag, I did some really cool activities, right? We love to talk about how we can get our students engaged in hands on activities. It's like a buzzword we use all the time.
And so examples of this were we raise broiler chickens, right, and process them at the school. That was a very hands on activity. Or we also planted wetland trees, right? Southeast coastal Louisiana to help prevent coastal erosion, very hands on activities.
We got to go and swamps and plant trees. But when I reflect on that, I have to think about what deep down did my students learn. I miss the mark a lot of times on making that an educative experience. And we can get into that a little bit, but there's also some other reasons to write why we use experiential learning and an agricultural education.
But maybe I should pause there and say that's kind of what it's not. It's not just the hands on activity. It's a little bit more than that. I appreciate where you started there, Brad, because a lot of times, at least for me, when people come out automatically say that it's hands on, it's like nails on a chalkboard for me.
And I know what they mean and I know what their intention is. But at the same time, if we're only focusing on the manual pieces of it, we're missing out on a lot of opportunities. And I look forward to the conversation today because I know you're going to get to those other pieces that really do make it experiential. A couple of thoughts going early on to some of the early works in and around experiential learning or what we call learning by experience.
So John Dewey had a couple of tenets. And so when we think about what experiential learning is, sometimes I think about some of the outcomes that should happen. If we've done experiential learning well, if we've done education well, there's a couple of things that should result. The first is the fact that we need to prepare learners to be members of a democratic society, productive members that can contribute.
And that's something that he said. And so when we think about why experiential learning is so useful in agricultural education, some of these ring true. That's a huge part of what we do in Ag Education. Another is the idea that learning has to have real life applications, right?
If it gets too clinical, too isolated, right, in a desk only learning abstract concepts, we've got almost no use for that. We have to know how we can apply what we're learning in real life situations. We do that in Ag class quite a bit. The third is that learning has to be interdisciplinary to build connections, right?
We talk about that all the time in Ag class, how we apply other concepts from other subject areas, even core subject areas, science, English, math, history. And so that's part of really quality experiential, educated learning. And then the last is experiential learning doesn't happen without the key, and that's the educator, right? And so hopefully all of you listening recognize that to facilitate really good experiential learning includes positive influences from the teacher.
The teacher has to build relationships, has to build motivation, and has to be a facilitator of learning experiences and educated experiences. So I say all that, right? Jump in really deep, I'll write off the bat in a philosophy. Just as those are some ideas of when we think about what experiential learning is, we know that if we have some of those kind of outcomes.
If we're seeing some of those elements that I just described that really I need to attribute back to John Dewey, then we're doing a good job with experiential learning. But that begs the question of, okay, how? How do we facilitate that experience? Well, I think that's the real question.
I think as we go through the work that you're doing here, and I know that your co-authors, they're, you know, great. You've done some other work in that area as well, is how do we really as a teacher prepare ourselves to do this true experiential learning? What does that look like? And how do I get ready to be the educator to guide this kind of learning?
It can get a little bit messy sometimes, right? Because it's not like we have a, you know, a 50 minute lecture scripted out that we can stay in the front talk. And so there's a dynamic interactions that are occurring with the individual students and between individual students and our role as a facilitator as the teacher that's in the room with them. And so part of it is being comfortable with the unknown, because when you jump down this pathway, even though you might have a plan, you don't really know for sure exactly what is going to happen.
Well, not that your students be comfortable with the unknown. And that's the great point. So that's the great point. That's the great point, right?
Because, you know, students might be conditioned to expect to come in and sit down and write and then have memorized stuff to take a test on. And so sometimes it takes a while to condition students to think differently about their learning and to be really participative in their learning. Well, and thinking about what the end point is. And so if we go down this path, what a group of students in a classroom are going to learn may not be exactly the same thing.
What they take home and remember and what they transfer and understand and construct in their own mind could look different from student to student. And we got to feel comfortable with that too. When I get asked, well, how do we facilitate an educated experience? I try to boil it down as simply as I can, even though, like Grady just mentioned, it's super complex, right?
And sometimes, and this is something that Grady's always presented to folks when you think about how complex an experience can get. You think of a slinky, right? That you threw down the steps and it gets all jumbled and it can be really messy. And so that image stands true in my mind when I think about facilitating experience.
But if I was just going to really boil it down, I think about four pillar components to quality experiential learning. And there's really a lot more there to that in this. But I think about an experience first. Sometimes that may be a concrete experience or even an abstract experience.
We also have reflection prompted by the educator. We have conceptualization, sometimes referred to as generalization, or just asking students to think about what they learned and why it's important, what meaning does it have internally in their mind, and then application. How do we apply what we've learned, maybe in the same context or transfer it to other contexts? And so we think about planning an educative experience.
We've got those four kind of components. And that's really oversimplified. What's also going to make it even messier is when you think about that jumbled up slinky is we don't always start with a learning experience, right? We might start somewhere else.
At the beginning of a class, even we might pose a question to have students think about a time or prompt something that we're going to have students think back to a similar situation to get them started. Well, we're starting our experience off with reflection. And so we need to recognize too that, yeah, those elements are important, but sometimes they happen more than once. Sometimes they happen in different orders or sequences.
And so we start to see how it can very quickly turn into a jumbled slinky. There's not like this stepwise formula, if you will, to planning out an experience. It depends on the context. It depends on our learners.
It depends on whether they're at in the process. And it depends on where we want to go. I think it's a great description. And you know, it's part of me wishes there was a stepwise thing that would be a lot easier to teach a lot easier to do as the teacher.
But man, this is, but you had the flexibility and you get to be that professional to figure out how to use this. It is so powerful when you are intentional in the planning to use as kind of a technique. Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes, you know, an obvious educator, I might prescribe that they use a stepwise approach starting out, right?
Have an experience prompt reflection, discuss with students, what does this mean? And how can we apply it in future settings? That might be a stepwise recipe. We know or we should know as educators, right?
As professionals that it can be a lot more complexy or complexy messy. It combines complex and messy. So we're making up new words here. Add that one to the finger card.
I will add that on the finger card. Yeah, so complex and messy. Then it actually appears that, you know, it's then just those four steps. But that might be a place to start, right?
Do I have an experience? Have we reflected? Have we talked about what it means and how we applied it to future settings? And then once we get more comfortable with that formula, right, we might mix things up based on what our learning objectives or outcomes want to be or who our audience is, what experiences they bring to the table already, right?
We might do things differently or have a different sequential order for eighth graders than we would with our senior ag students who may come with some prior experiences and knowledge. And one thing I think about here, we had a great conversation about tips for the teachers to be doing from here. But, you know, one thing Grady was mentioned that talked about earlier about, you know, students getting used to this, there's a role for the student in experiential learning. And I guess maybe you can one of you guys talk a little bit more about what is the role of the student in this type of learning?
And then how can we prepare the student for that role so they can fully engage and fully benefit from experiential learning? So I mean, the students are integral, right? I mean, the students are an active participant in their own learning and they're actively constructing their understanding based on the experiences that we are providing them. And I think it's important for the educator to think through, you know, what's the readiness of the student, right?
And maybe a whole class is not at the same place. You might have some students that are very, very capable and are already pretty deep thinkers about a topic and you might have students that are really novices. And so we might think about how we might scaffold learning in a way that the students that maybe be less, that are less prepared are given a lot more structure and support from us, whereas the students that are more experienced can have greater amounts of autonomy in their learning. But then we can't underestimate the value of that peer to peer or that student to student learning that happens and the interactions that happen in the learning environment because that's instrumental.
And, you know, particularly, you know, a lot of our ad classrooms across the country are facing larger class sizes than maybe they had historically. And, you know, when you've got 25 or 30 or 35 students in a room, they're going to interact with each other probably more than they're going to interact with the teacher. And so that's an important role to consider. We're talking about key terms and words and, you know, your bingo card for a new one I'm going to introduce.
That idea of the student, the teacher, in the environment, those three things working together, how important that is, some folks refer that as embeddedness of education, right? All of this is embedded within one another and those things work together, right? And so sometimes we think about how much autonomy, like Grady mentioned, we might give to a student versus retain as a teacher, and then even how much we might encourage students to lean on their peers versus themselves. I think one of the things I really appreciate about both the discussion of students working through this process and teachers kind of planning for this process, the way you all talk about it really implies a growing skill.
Even thinking about kind of the recipe piece and plan it like, yeah, maybe I start with this recipe. And as I get to know that recipe, I know it needs XYZ or I use different tools and I do different things and I have that freedom to do it. But I think about that from the learning perspective as well. Like, I think to Grady's point earlier, we know how to school, we come in, we have this way that we think this should go.
We're breaking the recipe a little bit when we bring this in and ask students to do it. And I think this idea of I am learning to plan. I am learning more about how I can learn in this process as well as thinking about it as a mechanism for delivery. I'll weigh into a little bit about this and you can look at other things and Brad kind of mentioned it at first that, you know, did a really good job of providing experiences, but many times in some research will support this too.
We miss out on reflection. And I remember back in my time as a teacher and in steel now as a teacher educator when I'm working with pre-service teachers, you know, thinking about preparing your learners for experient learning, we might want to start with explicit instructional reflection. Because many times, I've noticed our students don't really know how to reflect or what it means to reflect. So perhaps before we even introduce students to experiences or some different things, think about or with them and help them think through is reflection.
How do I reflect? Am I reflecting in the moment? Am I reflecting on the moment? What does reflection look like?
That looks differently for all of us? It could be journaling. It could be just a moment of silence to think through things. But at the end of the day, when I look at all experiential learning models, no matter if it's from the beginning of time till now, reflection is a key piece.
Reflection and helping us to develop conceptualizations and reflecting on thinking about how do I apply that in another way. So I think one thing when using this is really work with your students ahead of time on training them how to reflect. I think that's a great point, JC, because I think too often we think that everybody is reflective and I would argue that reflection is a developmental skill and we have to really spend a lot of time helping individuals develop that. Much like we said earlier, students are going to be at different stages of that.
But we can't assume that they're going to be reflective just because we're going to ask a couple of questions. And so I think that's an important part. Another kind of point that I think is a good place for us to spend a little bit of time and we certainly learned a lot about it coming out of COVID too, is that a lot of people will assume experiential learning is very individualistic. And I think what we're hearing today is that's not the case.
Much like all of our education, it's a social experience. And so we have to learn and grow from one another. There is this internal processing, but there's a lot of engagement from peers, from the teacher as a facilitator and those things. And so I think it's important for us to remember that education and what we do is still a social experience and a social experiment in a lot of things that we do.
Yeah, absolutely. And reflection doesn't have to always be independent, right? It can integrate some of those other learners. So sometimes I think it's just even having strategies as the educator ready to go that might appeal to different learning styles.
And so yeah, that may be independent reflection and I might have students journal or something like that, independent thought. But I might include other learners in the process, right? That whole idea of educational theory we talked about social constructivism. And so we talked about this idea that we're going to interact with other learners and learn from it, right?
How many times do we share ideas with other people and we learn from that? So some strategies might be having conversations with peers, maybe even doing some work where we draw out some reflections with others, some type of like word map or something or interacting with other ideas, open Q&A and group discussion are always that we can prompt that reflection process on our experiences while also including other learners in the process. Well, this has been a great conversation and I'm sitting here thinking here, especially the last few moments of our conversation thinking about maybe even to start off with in addition to just using experiential learning, having a conversation with our students about why we're doing what we're doing in the class as we're talking about getting them ready for the social environment that we're going to be learning and why are we doing it this way? And then helping them to prompt for that reflective piece to do that.
So Brad, JC, Grady, you have given us a lot of great things to think about. Really appreciate your work in this area. I hope everyone else is listening. Got a lot out of it and they're going to be able to engage with us on social media, engage with your colleagues, talking about this work, about being more intentional, about doing experiential learning and really going back to how you started us all off Brad, that experiential learning is not just hands on.
There's a lot more components in there and being intentionally in the planning piece and in the execution piece to make these things happen. So gentlemen, thank you so much for being with us today here on Out pellets tips for ag teachers podcast. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Out pellets. Check out our website for more information on this topic and to learn more about our guests.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to stay connected and be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. For Mike and Becky, this is Brian here by the Out pellets saying thank you and we look forward to seeing you again on another episode of Out pellets tips for ag teachers.