Never run the trip without the debrief

Dewey (1938) said it plainly: experience alone does not educate, and some experiences are mis-educative. The trip, the marketplace simulation, the practical: these generate raw material, and the debrief converts it into learning or it evaporates. Yet the debrief is what gets sacrificed to the timetable, the packing up, the bus. Protect it like content. The working sequence: what happened, what did you feel, what does it mean, where else does this apply. Four moves, in order, in writing or discussion. (Manning's experiential-learning-cycle-designer skill structures the whole cycle around this conversion.)

In practice

We just ran this experience: [trip / simulation /
practical, brief description] with [year group].
Learning objective it was meant to serve: [objective].
Design a 40-minute debrief lesson:
1. Reconstruct: 3 questions to establish what
   actually happened, in sequence.
2. React: 2 questions surfacing what students felt
   and noticed.
3. Conceptualise: 2 questions that pull the
   experience toward the general principle.
4. Transfer: one short task applying the principle
   to an unrelated context.
Include a 5-line individual writing frame for step 1.

• Timetable the debrief before you book the experience; if there is no lesson slot for it afterwards, postpone the trip.
• Run the four moves in order: reconstruct what happened, surface reactions, extract the principle, transfer it to a new case.
• Collect individual written reflections before opening group discussion, because the loudest student's account otherwise becomes the whole class's memory.
• End with application: one short task that uses the principle in a context that looks nothing like the original experience.