Kolb's Learning Cycle:

For this task we have been asked to look at David Kolb's Learning Cycle as way of reflecting on our own work, Kolb's theory has been designed to help any practitioner develop their learning skill's to high standard. Using his method can really help anyone improve on anything they want to do as long as they use his theory. It consists of four stages that I think are easy to understand and all you have to do as an practitioner is apply this to everyday life and with every experience and you will be able to analyze yourself and you teaching method's thoroughly. Kolb's four stages are:

Concrete Experience: This is where you are having or actually going through the experince.

Reflective Observation: This is where you reflect on the experience you had.

Abstract Conceptualisation: This is learning from the experience.

Active Experimentation: This is where you carry out what you have learnt from your                                                                   experience.

Using this cycle I am going to try and to explain an experience I had covering the four stages. For my Final Module at Barnet College Foundation Degree we were asked to either write a script for the class to perform or just perform in someone's piece or direct a piece, I chose to direct and help write a play lasting 20 minutes with a partner who's name is Sophia, we decided to call our play " Breaking The Silence."

Concrete Experience:

Sophia and I wanted to write a play that was based on Sophia's personal experience of poverty, abuse, freedom and hopefulness. As it was a subject to close to Sophia's heart she asked me to direct the piece as I would have an outside eye so to speak, to start off with we decided that this one woman show would portray her life in four stages, from the age of 5, age 12, age 15 and adulthood. At this stages we thought that it would be a good idea to have a theme behind it to portray what was going on, so when sophia played a 5 year old she was talking and showing what her life was like then. At the age of 12 Sophia was shipped off to her aunties while her mum worked her second job and this is where the abuse started, at the age of 15 is where the abuse worsened and she deteriorated more within herself and with her family, at the final stage in the play was where she had become an adult and delivered a monologue on how she had overcome her past to meet her husband and have children. This was really tough for me to direct has I had never directed a piece with such substance, I thought to myself how am I going to do this in time for june which was when our performance was. As it was Sophia who is 36 years old and who has her own drama school is used to directing so when I said that I wanted her to do a certain action for example, she would not want to do it like that. I think we spent most of our time disagreeing until I said to Sophia that she has to try and not get to personally involved she has to remove herself from directing and just act and leave me to direct and trust my instincts. When I had said this to Sophia she knew that I was making sense and listened to what I had told her to do.

Reflective Observation:

Although this is probably the most stressed I had been on the course looking back I am actually glad that I worked with someone who is fiery as I have learnt how to behave around them and talk to them, I mean you never know if someone in this industry is going to be worse then her but it is just how you deal with the situation that will make you come back on top. For this play I realised that we needed some sort of structure as to what was going in the play writing wise, how we were going to show such scenes to the audience and how to manage the time we had until the show most efficiently, The first thing I did was to draw up a timetable and have a note/logbook ready to jot down what went well in the session and what did not go so well, this helped us not waste time because we could clearly see what had worked in a scene and what had not so we concentrated on what went well and improved on it dramatically so that Sophia knew on which days the subjects we were tackling or improving. I said to Sophia to write the script as it is her personal life we were going to illustrate, so this was also included on the timetable very clearly so that she knew that she had that responsibility, as we could not practice our play at college because of the clashes of classrooms I had to make sure that either Sophia would come to mine or that I go to hers and that we would actually get on rehearsing and not talking. This was just a challenge by itself as Sophia and I can talk fro england but I had to remain focused because if the show had fallen apart it would be my fault as I am the director. 

So far I had come up with a timetable and I had delegated to Sophia what she had to do, the next big step was to get her to do some character research so that when it came to playing the 5 year old she was acting exactly how they would, this was also hard as she is used to just being a normal 36 year old, so I know this was a challenge for her but I mad her watch he film Jack where Robin Williams plays a child, I made her watch Belle out of emmerdale and I asked her to watch her own kids at her Drama School as they are from ages 5-12, so this would be perfect for her, after a while and after her character research I would make Sophia improvise a scene being 5 years olds and I would get her to repeat this until I thought it was good enough, I did this whole procedure with her for each age group we were going to show in the play, I then mixed it up a little by getting her to Improvise being 5 but when I called out "ADULT" she would have to switch characters, so that she would get used to playing any of the ages with hesitating.

I remember that- that little exercise alone took us 2 weeks to perfect and I thought to myself how we going to do this in time, but in fact having less time made us work more!. The next stage for us was to get Sophia to be off script so that we could really get our teeth into rehearsing and making the scenes perfect, this was not easy as we both had conflicting idea's as to how we wanted to show scenes me as an director wanted one way and Sophia wanted it another as it was her life story so she wanted to show it exactly how it happened, but we comprised as we both realised that we were headstrong because we wanted it to be good. I learnt to listen to Sophia as I was not there during her "growing up years" and she learnt to listen to me as I was interpreting what she was saying in an artistic way because although we wanted it to be a play with a message we had to put n a PERFORMANCE that would make the audience interested. 

Thinking back I remember that after sorting out these points for the play we began to work as though we were in a routine and everytime we tackled another scene I would get Sophia to break it down with me and just concentrate on working on that scene until I was satisfied , by doing this we began to work faster as we stuck to everything on the timetable, so eventually 2 weeks before the show we were ready to go on as we had worked out everything that had to be dealt with in an orderly manner to a high standard.

Abstruct Conceptualisation:

I think that I have learnt a bit from this experience, I say a bit because i have not really had the chance to put this cycle into play because I have not had another experience in a performing arts way but I am hoping that through this course I will have plenty to think and write about and now that I know about this cycle I can always use and apply it everyday life where it will probably become second nature. I think what I have taken away from this experience is that when you have to work with someone that is as headstrong as you are, then you have to come up with some ground rules so that you know what is expected of each of you and what job role each of you have and most importantly that you stick to it. I also think that being organised plays a great deal when doing something on this kind of scale so having a timetable and sticking to it is important then you will not fall behind but actually you will benefit from it, having a notebook or logbook is a great help as you memory cannot hold anything I found this very useful indeed because when you are rehearsing a scene and note down something that has gone well or something you need to work on then when it comes to rehearsing that scene all you have to do is look at your notes and proceed from there this also helps you not to waste time. 

Active Experimentation:

I have as yet had the chance to try out what I have learnt but For this Blog Project I did draw up and timetable of what I was going to do each day and I would stick to only that so that I would not stress myself out, so for instance on Monday I would just concentrate on putting up my CV and making sure that the information on there was correct and read over it so see if i could add more etc, then on Tues I would just concentrate on My 5 Resources again looking over everything and making sure it was correct. I found that working this way helped me take in the information on what I was learning easier as I was not overloading my brain and most importantly I was not getting stressed out but actually enjoying what I had learnt and being quite proud of my blog thinking " how did I do that?". So I suppose what I have taken from this experience is how to use my time effectively and productively and have all the information correct and a high standard (I hope). I am hoping that as we continue with this course I will be able to have more chance to express what I have learnt and to use the Kolb theory as a way of expressing it.

Overall I think that Kolb's theory is a very good way to reflecting on every experience you have so that you know what you have to improve on and how you are going to plan out what it is you want to achieve.