Experience and Structure

Two events this past weekend prompted me to think a great deal about the notion of “crafting experiences”. On Friday Cantor Lisa Arbisser led a Jazz service. The unique combination of music and prayer drew people in and transported them to a spiritual place. The experience of the service was powerful and immediate, organic and flowing. It was not an experience that felt planned or highly structured, yet that is the irony of immersive and moving experiences. Most of them feel unplanned and improvised, but the truth is they are highly planned and structured.

This was the subject of the latest professional development session, on Sunday. After setting up the theoretical framework of “challenge” and how it is supported by experiential education (here – session 2), in past sessions, we focused on the practical element of how to plan effective experiences which promote challenge. The teachers were introduced to a planning tool which was created by me and a colleague (and consultant) Naomi Less. The aim of this tool is to help the teachers create experiences which will be accessible to all students, which will invite them in, and push them to challenge themselves. The common misconception is that this is best done through minimal structure and maximum exposure to pure, unplanned moments. In actuality the best way to make an experience work – to make it powerful, immersive, and immediate is to make sure that it is carefully thought through, well-planned, and thoughtfully structured. In the session, the teachers worked with this new planning tool to plan actual lessons and found it to be tremendously useful. This notion of creating more structure in order to allow the students got over their anxiety over trying something new and different was very helpful for the teachers. They all appreciated the format of this tool and we will be using it in our work together as they will use it to submit lesson plans in this format from now on.

Through using this new format, we can enrich and deepen the learning of all of our students.