Imagine a classroom where textbooks come to life and learning becomes a fun adventure filled with exploration, discovery, and real-world applications. While it might sound like a fictitious movie scene, it is becoming a reality, thanks to experiential learning. For the uninitiated, experiential learning is a modern-day educational approach that focuses more on active engagement from students and direct experiences to enhance learning outcomes.
This approach goes beyond the traditional textbook-only teaching method, encouraging students to actively participate in experiments, hands-on activities, real-world projects, and simulations. We at Excelsior American School are proud to state that we are one of the first few good schools in Gurgaon to have embraced experiential learning for our students. We have seen how it gives our students an edge over others. It helps them gain absolute clarity and understanding of the taught subjects and topics.
Our teachers are seamlessly incorporating this teaching method into daily classroom sessions so students obtain maximum benefit from each class. If you’re new to experiential learning, this blog will tell you everything you must know about this unique educational approach.
Why Choose Experiential Learning Over Traditional Learning Methods?
Times are changing fast, and so are the learning requirements. Children of the 21st century cannot risk excelling only academically. They must grow intellectually strong and equip themselves with numerous soft skills and cognitive abilities that are crucial to thriving in today’s landscape. It is exactly what experiential learning helps them develop.
We at Excelsior American School have readily embraced experiential learning to ensure that our students don’t get left behind. To provide a pleasant experience to our pupils, we follow a healthy mix of different ways. For example, we organize field trips and plan community service projects for our students. It helps children relate their learning to the world around them.
At our school, we focus a lot on providing our students with an experiential learning experience because it benefits them in the following ways:
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Encourages Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving Skills
When children engage in practical learning, they begin thinking critically. They start analyzing situations and develop strong problem-solving skills needed to thrive in today’s fast-changing landscape. At Excelsior American School, we make students devise solutions to real-world challenges so that they learn to adapt, strategize, and make the best decisions. These are invaluable skills that every 21st-century child should learn for a prosperous future.
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Develops Strong Communication & Collaboration Abilities
In today’s world, people cannot overlook the importance of having exceptional communication and collaboration abilities. Experiential learning is helping students foster and hone both these invaluable skills. For example, when we teach science students about a certain chemical reaction from a textbook, we don’t restrict our teaching within the classroom. We encourage students to perform safe experiments they’re learning in our well-equipped laboratory. Since most students work in groups or with a partner, they eventually improve their communication and collaboration abilities.
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Seamlessly Integrates Knowledge and Application
Experiential learning is designed to bridge the gap between practice and theory by integrating knowledge with real-world/real-life applications. Through experiential learning, students get plenty of opportunities to see how the concepts they’ve learned apply to their environment. As a result, they develop a better understanding of the taught subjects and topics.
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Prepares Children for the Future
We at Excelsior American School are firm about enabling every single student of ours to grow aptly prepared for the future, and it can only be done by equipping them with the competencies and skills needed to navigate real-world challenges. This is why our teachers are trained to handpick age-appropriate experiential learning experiences that teach students to adapt, collaborate, communicate, and think critically. All these skills are crucial to sustain in today’s rapidly changing economy.
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Provides Authentic Assessment Opportunities
Traditional teaching methods that only make students rely on textbook learning are now rapidly becoming obsolete. That’s because these methods mostly encourage learners to memorize the taught information and regurgitate the same – both of which are not helpful to students in any way. Today’s students should be given an opportunity to assess the information taught in the classroom, so they can identify what they’re learning is true.
This, we believe, is extremely important because we live in an information overload era. If children cannot discern genuine and fake information, they may experience trouble in the future. As a part of experiential learning, our teachers ensure all students develop the acumen to independently verify whether any information they encounter is authentic or fabricated.
Conclusion
The present-day environment expects more from children; hence, the decades-old teaching methods won’t suffice. It is why unique teaching methods like experiential learning are gaining momentum. This educational approach brings theory to life and helps prepare children for the real world. The main aim of experiential learning is to equip students with the skills they need to succeed in their future endeavors.
Here, we at Excelsior American School, recognized among the leading good schools in Gurgaon, would also like to highlight to the parents that experiential learning is not something that’s limited only to the school environment. With a little effort, you, too, can help your kids have an experiential learning experience at home. Give them plenty of opportunities to help them explore, discover, and bridge the gap between practice and theory. Take them to places like museum, park, beach, etc., where they get to learn about real-life stuff and also meet and communicate with people to gain insight into the practicality of things.
