Kolb's Learning Cycle

Kolb’s Learning Cycle

Every individual wants to grow, but growing should be supported with learning.

Individual can learn either by experience of others, or by applying the theoretical knowledge to what is experienced, or by observation of certain things or by actually doing.

In our life, every day we learn small to bigger things through our experiences.

Kolb’s argued the same learning cycle based on experiences of the individual. Kolb’s suggested that the learning takes place in 4 stages, with a certain pattern of cycle.

The 4 stages of learning given by David Kolb are;

1)   Concrete Experimentation [CE]: Learning the things by means of some new experiences or reinterpretation of somethings, which were learned in past. Such experiences will develop Concrete Experience.

2)   Reflective Observation [RO]: Once the experience is earned, one will start analyzing it. What we learned, how things happened and will start reviewing and recording their own experiences.

3)   Abstract Conceptualization [AC]: Once the individual have learned by reviewing and recording his own experiences, will start generalizing the theoretical concepts to the learning, by developing some hypothetical statements like, the sky is full of black cloud, it will rain today.

4)    Active Experimentation [AE]: Here the individual will apply his experience to test (planning) the hypothesis, will learn the things by actually doing the things. In this case, like, if it rains, his hypothesis is proved and the learning is confirmed.

Kolb’s explained the learning stages using 2 X 2 matrix as follows. The learning of an Individual always prefer a combination of two styles.

	Doing (Active Experimentation AE)	Watching (Reflective Observation RO)
Feeling (Concrete Experience - CE)	Accommodating (CE/AE)	Diverging (CE/RO)
Thinking (Abstract Conceptualization AC)	Converging (AC/AE)	Assimilating (AC/RO)

Diverging (CE-RO) feeling and watching: These individual prefers to watch rather than doing the things for getting their experience and learning. These kind of individual like to gather the information, analyze by different viewpoints. Therefore these people are very good at Brainstorming kind of jobs

Assimilating (AC-RO) Watching and Thinking: These type of individual prefers to get lot of explanation on happening things than believing in doing it. These type of individuals are less focused on other people. These kind of people do learning by exploring, reading or listening.

Converging (AC/AE) Doing and Thinking: In this style of learning, individual will learn the things by doing and then using this learning for solving the problems. Individuals with a converging learning style are best at finding practical uses for ideas and theories.

Accommodating (CE/AE) Doing and Feeling: The individual with this learning style prefer to have 'hands-on' experience, and relies on intuition rather than logic. If other people have some experience, these individual like to experiment or do the thing practical on their own and then they gets experiential learning.