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Within the context of other activities at MIT Sloan, this cycle is even more apparent. Perhaps nowhere more than in their more applied experiences - in projects for classes, club acitivities, internships, and extracurricular activities - MIT Sloan students learn by taking action that they prepare for and reflect on.!students in lobby.JPG|align=left!
We know from research on learning, change, and innovation, that we miss crucial opportunities to learn and improve if we only focus on large-scale, long time-frame learning experiences. Every chunk of experience can be seen from this preparation-action-reflection lens, and accumulating experience via several iterations of preparation, action, and reflection can be more instructive than a single larger endeavor with time for only one round of the learning cycle. In fact, it might be useful to think of the entire two-year program a journey around a spiral in which students work through the preparation-action-reflection cycle several times, focusing on different things each time as they learn more from their experience.
Here's what we'd like to tell students: travel around the learning spiral several times, while your're here, adjusting your journey on this path as you reflect on and make sense of your own experience. Exploit every opportunity to work through the preparation-action-reflection cycle in the domains that are most important to you. Choose courses, experiences, and job opportunties that maximize learning from each of these. Part of your task as a student is to take in the more formal, academic ideas and theories and figure out how to draw on and use them. In some courses, this is the work you will do with your peers and faculty; in other cases, you'll have access to materials that are already translated into more applied tools; and in still other cases, you'll focus more on the theories and conceptual frameworks that inform and support the more applied practices that you will learn and develop for yourself in the course of your practical experience.
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