Kolb's experiential learning cycle
A project with no debrief stays an anecdote you will tell in a bar a year from now. Four questions at the end turn it into something you will do better next time.
Four steps and the wheel closes. An experience, a look back at it, a rule drawn from it, a test of that rule — then round again, with a new experience.
- Concrete experiencethe event that has just happened
- Reflective observationwhat actually happened, before anyone judges it
- Abstract conceptualisationwhat rule follows from it for next time
- Active experimentationthe next event, where that rule gets tested
When your next project ends, give it twenty minutes and four questions: what happened, what surprised you, what general rule follows, what you will do differently. Write the answers where the next committee will find them.
Do not overdo this part: The idea that teaching should be matched to somebody's "learning style" has been refuted. The cycle works as a debrief structure; the style test does not.
David A. Kolb was at the MIT Sloan School of Management at the time, later at Case Western Reserve University. He presented experiential learning theory as a synthesis of Dewey, Lewin and Piaget in Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (1984). In parallel he developed the Learning Style Inventory, whose versions ran from 1971 to 4.0 (2011) and which has now been succeeded by the Kolb Experiential Learning Profile.
The full biography is on the public version →
No freely licensed likeness of this person exists, so this is a generated emblem. It is not a portrait.
A project without a debrief stays an anecdote rather than an experience. Closing a project in gslk's project module carries a specific sequence of questions precisely so that reflection is not left to goodwill. The cycle suits this because it is cheap: four steps, no forms, no score — a lens rather than an instrument.
These screens carry out this specific work. Every published work in the library also has at least an exercise — it is at the foot of this page.
- The debrief question structure when a project is closed (/admin/projects): experience → reflection → conceptualisation → new action.
- A coaching lens, not a student form: the cycle lives in the sequence of questions, not in a questionnaire. The user never even sees its name.
- The automated debrief engine is NOT SWITCHED ON YET — no coach questions have been written yet.
Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. (2nd ed., 2015, Pearson Education.)
- Open the source
- In copyright
These works are related to the one you just read — and not by accident:
same competency: Self-command
same competency: Self-command
same competency: Self-command
same competency: Self-command
The same work written at length: what it claims and what its evidence is worth.
Links to publishers and libraries. There are no links to unauthorised copies here, and there will not be.
- Pashler et al. (2008) — the paper that refuted learning styles
- Experience Based Learning Systems — Kolb's own institute and bibliography
Links open in a new window.