Page 12 - THE ONTARIO CURRICULUM, GRADES 11 AND 12 | Cooperative Education

THE ONTARIO CURRICULUM, GRADES 11 AND 12 | Cooperative Education
EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING AS THE FOUNDATION FOR COOPERATIVE EDUCATION
Experiential learning is an inquiry-based pedagogical approach that provides opportunities for students to co-construct their learning by participating in rich experiences connected to a community outside school; reflecting on those experiences to derive meaning; and applying their learning to influence their decisions and actions in various aspects of their lives. This learning process, rooted in the “experiential learning cycle”,4 helps deepen students’ learning and supports them in developing the skills, knowledge, and habits of mind they need to successfully navigate their future.
Cooperative education is a highly immersive form of experiential learning. The curriculum outlined in this document is designed to enable students to apply, refine, and extend their classroom learning in a community context outside school and, with the experience gained in the community context, to refine and extend their learning in the classroom not only in the cooperative education course but also in subsequent courses.
Experiential learning provides an important vehicle by which diverse communities can collaborate to ensure that the interests, needs, strengths, and aspirations of all students are recognized and reflected in the educational experience. It provides Ontario students with rich learning experiences that develop their capacity to become personally successful and compassionate citizens who meet the challenges of a fast-paced and globally connected world.
Experiential learning builds on a significant body of research and practice that indicate that students are more engaged, more motivated to learn, and more successful when they reflect on their experiences and connect what they are learning to situations they care about in their personal lives, their community, and the world around them. Experiential learning places students’ ideas and observations at the centre of the learning experience. The process often involves students conducting open-ended investigations that require them to engage in evidence-based reasoning and creative problem solving. Through this approach, students are supported in becoming knowledge builders rather than passive recipients of knowledge.5 It has also been shown that the experiential learning approach has psycho-social benefits for students, including increased self-esteem and engagement, improved motivation, and improved social and leadership skills.6 And finally, experiential learning assists students’ learning transfer; that is, it helps them to see the connections between the course content and its application in other contexts.7
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4. For details, see “Applying the Experiential Learning Cycle”, on pages 23–24.
5. Ontario Ministry of Education, Inquiry-Based Learning, Capacity Building Series, K–12, Secretariat Special Education 32 (Toronto: Author, 2013), available at http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/ inspire/research/CBS_InquiryBased.pdf.
6. Canadian Council on Learning, Lessons in Learning: The Benefits of Experiential Learning (Ottawa: Author, 2008).
7. C.D. Lee and W.M. Kahnweiler, “The Effect of a Mastery Learning Technique on the Performance of a Transfer of Training Task”, Performance Improvement Quarterly 13(3) (2000): 125–39.