Middle Years 

Learning from Experiences

This week saw the Year 7-9 students complete their mid-year exams. While the Year 9s are becoming ‘old hands’ at exams, this was the first experience of examinations for the Year 7s.

Outdoor Education is often based upon experiential learning and Klob’s experiential learning cycle often forms the theoretical basis for such programs. This cycle - simplified in the diagram below (based upon Klob, 1984) - can also be applied to our Middle Years students’ learning from their recent exams. 

1. Do it. This is doing the actual examination/s. The concrete learning experience.
2. What? This is when students go through their exams and should be a time of reflection on what happened for each exam.
3. So What? This is when students need to make sense of their mistakes and/or successes. Making generalised conclusions about what specifically influenced their good (or not so good) results in the exam.  
4. Now What? What will students do differently next time? What revision strategies will they continue to use? What strategies will they modify adapt or not use in the future? This is an important phase of the experiential learning cycle, which is often missed or forgotten.

This experiential cycle, in some form or another, will be followed in each subject once exams are returned. The Middle Years teachers spend a great deal of time going through and highlighting key learnings from each exam. I encourage the Year 7-9 students to make sure they reflect upon their exam experience and make sure they put into action their learning for the end-of-year examinations.

Ben Hawthorne

Head of Middle Years