Activities Must Have A Planned Educational Outcome

What's the point of your experiential education program? If you can't answer this or aren't quite sure about it, then you're going to struggle providing any real educational value to your students. If you're just running activities for the sake of running them, or because everyone else is doing it, you're missing some great opportunities to make a positive difference in your students’ lives.
 
Why are you doing what you're doing? The reality is most people can't tell you this and until you can answer this question, everything you do is just like a scatter gun approach, something might hit the mark and work, but chances are it won't. However, if you're clear on exactly what you want to achieve, then you can become laser focused in your approach and be able to consistently hit the mark.
 
A number of places I've worked had no idea what they were trying to achieve, despite programs having run for many years. ‘We've always done it this way’ doesn't actually mean anything’s actually being achieved. It could simply be the perpetuation of the same mistakes over and over again. Some places chop and change so much, not for continuous improvement purposes. Instead, they're haphazardly searching for something to work.
 
One program I worked on was so confused as to what they were trying to achieve. They did a bit of everything in an attempt to make everyone happy. Yet as a result, it didn't achieve much. On one hand they claimed to be promoting student independence, yet at the same time provided no opportunities for the students to explore and experience independence in any way. As a result, the activities were more structured around baby sitting and filling in time, due to the absence of any clear educational outcome. Sadly, it appeared a completely wasted opportunity for those students, but from the school's point of view, it was perceived as ‘safe’ and it looked nice in a brochure.
 
For every experiential education program you run, you need some real educational outcomes to add value and meaning to what you're doing. Activities without a goal, are just that, activities. If they're isolated and don't form a wider strategic vision, you may as well just go outside with your students and stare at clouds floating by, as this will achieve the exact same result, with far less effort required.
 
Please don't make the other mistake of shoving a bunch of academic outcomes into experiential education to try and make something fit. This again is rather pointless and often a misguided method used to try and justify an experiential education program. Randomly throwing academics in for the sake of it, comes back to not really understanding the question of why and what do we want to achieve?
 
One example of this was when a school I worked for was trying to make English fit into an outdoor education program. Nobody wanted to confront the fact head on that developing English skills wasn't the reason why we were running the outdoor program. Instead of making a decision and saying for this program, English isn't the focus and personal and social development is, they decided that bush poetry was a way that students would learn to get in touch with nature and as a direct consequence in touch with themselves. Needless to say it didn't work.
 
Instead of cramming stuff in for the sake of it, focus on what's important. For one program I ran, the whole point was social and emotional development. For another it was team building and leadership. Other ones have focussed on expanding comfort zones and overcoming fears. With each program, there were planned sequential stages to them and clear educational outcomes.
 
So what do you want to achieve? Do you want a nice glossy brochure approach, which looks wonderful and yet has no substance, or do you want to add to the educational value for your students so they're better equipped to handle anything the world throws at them? I'm personally not big on glossy brochures.
 
However, if you can answer your overall questions of “Why are we doing this? What do we really want to achieve?” you will find that experiential education opens up so many different opportunities for challenging students, expanding their horizons with unique experiences and promoting positive life-long emotional and social growth.