Dixon (1999) stated that Kolb proposed a cycle through which individual learning progresses (see figure 1.0) the cycle begins when each experiences the world through our senses. Kolb calls this step ‘concrete experience’, to indicate that he does not mean the vicarious experience we have through books or plays but a real world experience. Example of concrete experience could be as varied as sitting through a boring meeting or suffering the distress of losing job. Kolb suggest that to learn from our experience we most engage in a second step of consciously reflecting on what has occurred in the actual experience. Reflection is selective as we saw earlier, it is influenced by our expectations and our existing meaning. The third step in the learning cycle is making sense of we have experienced. In the language of this book that involves relating the new information to these existing meaning structures and out of that relationship creating new meaning. Kolb call this step ‘abstract conceptualization’. The final step in Kolb’s model is active experimentation. At this step we test out the meaning that we have constructed by taking action in the world which then leads to new tend to get more proficient at some steps of this process than at others and those we develop learning style preferences. But as he has noted all the steps are necessary to the extent that we slight any of the step, our learning is less effective and complete.
Kolb defines individual learning as the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience. Although the experimental learning cycle leaves out much of the details of the learning process that I have described in this chapter, both his definition and the experiential learning cycle capture the essence which is the learning is about interpreting what we experience in the world, also
