Dr. Lisa Endersby (Humber Polytechnic)
As part of the 2025 SoTL Speaker Series at Yorkville U +TFS, CTEI was honoured to host Dr. Lisa Endersby for her talk on Experiential Learning and Reflective Practice: From “What Happened” to “What Matters.”
Learning through experience promises meaningful, impactful student outcomes, but navigating the path from “experience” to “experiential” can be daunting with varied definitions, critical demands on our time, and new challenges for assessment. In this session, we unpacked what EE, EL, WIL and other acronyms mean for our pedagogy and practice. Beginning with a review of current theories and context, we explored reflection as the pedagogical “glue” that binds these ideas together and can help make learning “stick”. The session included time for discussion and hands-on practice with reflective methods.
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- Additional information, research, and scholarship:
- PDF of Slide Deck: Experiential Learning and Reflective Practice – Yorkville U and Toronto Film School 2025
- The Pedagogical Balancing Act: Teaching Reflection in Higher Education (Mary Ryan) – this is the full Mary Ryan article Lisa referenced in describing reflection as a skill. It also outlines a framework to provide some structure for what reflection might look like as both a teaching strategy and skill that students can develop.
- Development of a New Framework to Guide, Assess, and Evaluate Student Reflections in a University Sustainability Course (Kate Whalen & Antonio Paez) – this particular framework includes a more robust definition of reflection as well as a way to assess student reflections as a process for skill development.
- Reflection Toolkit (The University of Edinburgh) – Lisa has shared this toolkit with faculty colleagues in the past as a way to explain some key models of reflection as well as a more practical application of these theories/models.
- Reflection Guide and Rubric (University of Alberta) – this resource can be used as inspiration to assess student reflections as evidence of learning process and product. The rubric is based off of the What? So What? Now What? model Lisa referenced in the session.
- Measuring Actual Learning versus Feeling of Learning in Response to Being Actively Engaged in the Classroom (Deslauriers et al) – this is the article CTEI Senior Educational Developer Matthew Dunleavy mentioned during the session. Matthew and Lisa have both referenced it when discussing some of the challenges of experiential learning (particularly how students perceive whether/how they’re learning and how ‘satisfied’ they are with the experience).
- Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle – as a potential companion to the longer book Lisa referenced in the presentation, Lisa likes how TMU has outlined a summary of Kolb’s EL cycle in this resource.
- These following two reports from CEWIL tend to trend a little more towards Work-Integrated Learning (WIL), which may not be as relevant for SoTL or classroom EL, though there is some good and more current research and perspectives that can inform broader thinking:
- What? So What? Now What? – the University of Edinburgh toolkit Lisa mentioned above also has a great primer on the What? So What? Now What? model.
