Experience in cooperative learning and experiential education

I enjoy working within a cooperative learning/experiential education framework as a learning process. What this means in terms of my  experience and expertise is that I have participated in and led workshops and activities focused on groups working and learning together through team building activities, initiative exercises, ropes courses, energizers, and the sort in outdoor and indoor environments. I have worked with groups as small as two of us and as large as over 100, teachers and students, high ability and at-risk youth. It is a platform for learning regardless of who is leading. I highly recommend it. 

Cooperative learning: "a teaching strategy in which small teams, each with students of different levels of ability, use a variety of learning activities to improve their understanding of a subject. Each member of a team is responsible not only for learning what is taught but also for helping teammates learn, thus creating an atmosphere of achievement. Students work through the assignment until all group members successfully understand and complete it." 

Experiential education: "Principles of experiential learning are used to  design of experiential educationprograms.  Emphasis is placed on the nature of participants' subjective experiences. An experiential educator's role is to organize and facilitate direct experiences of phenomenon under the assumption that this will lead to genuine (meaningful and long-lasting) learning.  This often also requires preparatory and reflective exercises. Experiential education is often contrasted with didactic education, in which the teacher's role is to "give" information/knowledge to student and to prescribe study/learning exercises which have "information/knowledge transmission" as the main goal." (Wilderdom)

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