4-H is America’s largest youth development organization. Through 4-H, youth are put on a trajectory to thrive through experiential learning in a strong developmental context. The 4-H Thriving Model is the theory of change for positive youth development in 4-H. High quality 4-H program settings provide youth a place to belong, matter and explore their personal spark. High quality settings foster developmental relationships with youth, relationships that express care, challenge growth, and share power. These components help ensure that 4-H programs provide a nourishing developmental context – a place where youth can belong and grow.
Current research points to the advantage of authentic instruction that involves “active knowledge construction” by learners, relevance, active feedback on learner progress, ongoing opportunities to rethink and reflect, and highly interactive learning activities (Eccles & Gootman, 2002). For decades, 4-H Youth Development has been using active knowledge construction processes through a process called experiential learning.
WHY USE EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING?
- Multiple senses can increase retention.
- Multiple teaching methods can be integrated to maximize creativity.
- Child-centered learning becomes the focus.
- Discovery of knowledge and solutions builds competence and confidence.
- Students can learn life skills that will be used, in addition to subject matter content.
- Learning is more fun!
4-H Youth Development relies heavily upon the five steps of the experiential learning model to teach life skills. The sequential steps of the model help students identify what they have learned from a 4-H experience or activity and to apply that learning to other experiences or situations. This model requires that the “teacher/leader” be very clear about the skill or concept targeted and that the experience and the processing questions are designed to support that learner goal. The experiential learning process engages the learners in all phases of the activity, resulting in the ability to generalize this learning to new situations.
