More than a hundred people, from 42 organizations – schools, universities, businesses, Forest Park Forever, St. Louis Zoo, and more – met at Maplewood Richmond Heights Saturday to learn about and experience experiential learning. The focus was “Learning as Play”.
Maplewood Richmond Heights Middle School Principal Mike Dietrich helped host the meeting.
“Anytime people are interacting and you want to build community and learn and collaborate, that’s essentially what experiential education is,” he said.
“Whether it’s teaching that kids can learn physics in trees, or we can teach math through magic, the idea is that we can make learning fun and still get kids where they need to be socially, emotionally and academically,” he said.
The College School Head of School Ed Maggart said a group of teachers there had an idea a couple years ago to bring a group together on the topic, and ended up with 230 one evening.
“It was obvious that there was a real need for this,” he said. Since then they formed a Meetup group and have met at three different locations. The MRH event was the group’s first all-day conference.
Jim Cain, author of five adventure-based team building books, was invited to “get everybody playing together,” he said.
“The sound of children playing is a sound that most people enjoy, but the sound of adults playing is really a neat sound,” Cain said. “So the goal this morning was, we had a lot of individuals, to bond them together, and help them connect.
“My job was to make them feel like one group not 40 separate pieces. We sang together, we danced together, we played some games together.”