‘Flow’ – not activities – makes experiential learning stick

Have you ever thought a seminar went well, only to hear a student say: “I didn’t see the point”? 

When GenAI makes content instantly available, the university classroom has to offer something that cannot be generated or downloaded. Something too valuable to miss. One solution? Experiential learning.

But experiential learning design requires careful thought. All too often we fall into the trap of simply stacking activities. A simulation here. A reflection there. The room looks busy but the learning feels thin. If students leave in the same cognitive or emotional state as when they arrived, there is no shift in thinking. 

Here is how to design a learning flow that develops cognition and builds skills.

1. Design around learning ‘flow’, not activities

The moment you lead with an activity, it dictates your time, your pacing and your expectations. You might then find yourself retrofitting the learning outcomes. Instead, begin with a single goal: one specific change you want to happen in the student by the time they leave the room. Once that goal is clear, ask a useful design question: “What do I want my students to feel during each part of the session to make that change possible?”

For instance, instead of scheduling 10 minutes of group discussion (activity), identify the shift: “I want students to move from scepticism to curiosity” (flow). This dictates that the session must start with a provocative contradiction.

Experiential sessions are energy-intensive. Students interpret instructions, coordinate with others, manage tools and take social risks, often all at once. Overwhelm them at the start and they check out before the real work begins. Designing the flow first lets you sequence effort.

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2. Map the learning arc

Even a 60-minute session rarely gives you 60 minutes of learning. Between late arrivals, settling in and attention decay, what you are really managing is engagement.

Whether you have an hour or half a day, the design problem is the same. You need an arc. In my practice, I work with three distinct phases:

Warm-up: build orientation and confidence. Start with low-stakes tasks that help students find their footing. In a recent professional development session, I skipped the lecture and ran a speed round instead. Students had five minutes to write a bio, three minutes to visualise it and 30 seconds to present it to a partner. It was fast, playful and low risk. The content changes but the principle stays the same: build confidence before introducing complexity.

Peak: introduce productive difficulty. This is where you move from playing to building. In the same session, students used AI to refine their work, but with a constraint. They first had to identify something authentic that an algorithm could not invent, something unique, specific to them or the problem they were solving. The challenge was introspective, not technical. This tension sparked learning.

Release: consolidate through action. End with structured consolidation. We finished with a pitch event where students presented to an unfamiliar audience. They left with a refined professional bio, a usable slide deck and the visceral experience of holding the attention of a room full of strangers.

Topics and content change. The emotional arc does not: safety, productive difficulty, success.

3. End with something tangible

Experiential learning transforms but, without an artefact, that transformation stays trapped in the moment.

Do not let students leave empty-handed. End with an artefact that helps them reconnect the dots later. Something that brings students back to what they did, how they did it and why it matters when the next task arrives. It might be a photo of a whiteboard strategy. A rough prototype. A shared digital draft. A mind map on paper. It does not need to be polished. It needs to exist.

When students realise that a rough artefact from week three becomes the foundation for later work, engagement shifts. As artefacts accumulate across sessions, isolated tasks start to look like a portfolio. A through line.

Keep returning to this question as you plan: what visible trace will remain to prove that the internal shift occurred?

If students leave your session more capable than when they arrived, you designed an experience.

Irina Gokh is associate professor of education at De Montfort University.

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