This is an activity for student teachers that looks both at the study of poetry and how pupils learn. One of the things we examine at the beginning of the teaching session is how often pupils are not given either time to learn in their own fashion and/or reflect on what they learn during the school day. We introduce student teachers to the Kolb learning cycle as a way of combining both these issues and giving them a means of planning their lessons in the future.
There is much information on Kolb on the web but to summarise his learning cycle – he felt that people went through four stages of learning – experiential, reflective, analytical and practical. The chances are that we lean towards one style of learning more than another. English teachers tend to be more experiential and reflective than analytic or practical. Maths teachers tend to be more analytical and Science teachers more practical and analytic. Kolb, however, believed that in order to learn anything one needed to experience them all. The tendency is for English teachers to go from say reflective activities: brainstorm everything you can think about (e.g. a character, a setting, words for a poem) and then go straight on to the practical activity (write a character study or a poem). Kolb, on the other hand, made it clear that truly to learn the pupil should start with something experiential – reading something written about a character; then be reflective – brainstorm on the character; next be analytic – decide categories under which the brainstorm could go and finally be practical – write a character study.
