The cycle of learning

Two tools from the education world, both for anyone who wants to learn anything, and both worth knowing by name.

In 1984 a psychologist named David Kolb described how adults actually learn, as a cycle with four stations. Concrete experience: you do something. Reflective observation: you look back at what happened. Abstract conceptualization: you make sense of it, form an idea. Active experimentation: you try the idea out. And around again. Kolb's finding was that most people are strong in one or two stations and skip the others, and that's where learning stalls. The doer who never reflects repeats mistakes. The thinker who never experiments has theories and no results.

In 1956 a committee led by Benjamin Bloom built a ladder of what it means to know something, from the bottom up: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create. Most schooling stops at the second rung. Most mastery lives on the top three.

These are Meaning keys because meaning is made by the whole cycle, not just the experience. One hundred and three days of walks are concrete experience. The log is reflective observation. These letters are the concepts. The daily action is the experiment. You've been running Kolb's cycle since day one, and the chamber about meaning is where you look at the whole wheel and ask what it's been teaching.

And Bloom's ladder tells you where you are. You remember the keys. You understand most of them. You've applied many. Analyze, evaluate, create: that's the work of this chamber and the rest of the year. Making meaning is the top rung. It's the one where you stop receiving the keys and start cutting your own.