Students learn more fully when they are able to engage with each other and have the ability to voice their own experiences as a means of peer learning. This means principles of democratic education are the foundation to effective learning in trainings, workshops, classrooms, and any communities of learning. I recently led a workshop for my colleagues about how we can do just that.
I currently work with students who are serving in internships while they make
meaning of their experience through the lens of their future career, so I combined the concepts of democratic education with Kolb’s Cycle of Experiential Learning for the workshop. I built the workshop around discussing the experiences both good and bad we’ve had in group dialogues. We then discussed what the outcomes of those experiences were, what we can learn from them, and how we can use those experiences to improve our own skills and planning.
Once we were able to conceptualize why classroom activities were successful or needed improvement we shifted gears to discuss how we can use our experiences, concepts of democratic education, and Kolb’s theory to add new elements to our existing workshops so we can encourage more the peer learning that is valuable to our students. We then discussed the experimentations we came up with to improve peer learning in the current workshops and took notes so that we could incorporate our ideas in the future. The workshop was designed to use Kolb’s model to conceptualize our own learning about facilitation as a framework for how we could use the same method with our students to encourage more peer learning. The workshop was successful in implementing this concept and highlighted new ways for us to proceed in workshop design and implementation.