The Four Learning Approaches

All of these reformers’ approaches have led to four different learning processes, all of which are overlapping. Action-driven approaches, explored by the likes of academics Reg Revans, Argyris, Schön, and Wenger, emphasize the behavioral changes that take place when managers solve organizational problems (Revans, 1980). The cognition approaches of people like Robert Kegan, Stephen Klein, Etienne Wenger, Daniel Goleman, and Peter Senge focus on ways in which managers think, specifically on individual and group thinking processes such as memory and perception, with a view to creating coherent, orderly representations of complex problems (Goleman, 2005; Kegan, 1982; Klein, 2007). The reflective approaches of individuals like Russ Vince, Michael Reynolds, Jack Mezirow, Gordon Dehler, and Ann Welsh focus on the process of critical reflection using historical, social, and cultural evidence while the experiential approaches of the likes of William Torbert, David Kolb, Judy Le Heron, and Ikujiro Nonaka focus on how managers acquire and transform old knowledge into new knowledge (Dehler, 2006; Kolb, 1984; Le Heron & Sligo, 2005; Lewis, Welsh, & Dehler, 2002; Nonaka, 1995; Reynolds & Vince, 2007; Torbert, 1991).

But it has been David Kolb who has taken the discipline into its most refined stage, having integrated Dewey’s pragmatism, Lewin’s social psychology, Piaget’s cognitive development, Rogers’s client-centered therapy, Maslow’s humanism, and Perls’s Gestalt therapy. Kolb’s shorthand description of the concept is that learning is the process “whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (Kolb, 1984). His model takes concrete experience through the process of observation and reflection, to the formation of abstract concepts and generalizations, and finally to testing the implications of new concepts in new situations. The experiential way of learning, he says, involves the application of the information received from the educator to the experiences of learners (Kolb, 1984). It does not consist of activity generated in the classroom alone, and learners do not acquire their knowledge exclusively from the educator. Rather, they learn through the process of taking the new information derived in the classroom and testing it against their accustomed real-life experiences. The learner thus transforms both the information and the experience into knowledge of some new or familiar subject or phenomenon. In Kolb’s model, the educator is a facilitator of a person’s learning cycle.