DALE'S CONE Of EXPERIENCE (REFLECTION)

Education is information, recapitulation, retrospection and reconstruction. These are all continuous process of education and only be provided with the help of experience. Different experiences are planned and adapted to educate and train the learners at different levels of education system. Edgar Dale (April 27,1900-March 8,1985) was a U.S educationists who developed the famous Cone of experience Dale's was a professor of education in University. He made several made several contributions to audio instructions including a methodology for analyzing the content of motion pictures. Edgar Dale, an expert in audio-visual education. Audio-visual methods in teaching that he name Cone of Experience to discuss various modalities channels of imparting information.

Dale Cone experience is a visual model that is composed of eleven (11) stages starting from concrete experiences at bottom of the Cone then it becomes more and more abstract as it reach the peak of the cone. Also according to Dale, the arrangement in the cone is not based on abstraction and on the members of senses involved. The experiences in each stages can be mixed and are interrelated that fosters more more meaningful learning. According to one of the principles in the selection and use of teaching strategies, the more senses that are involved in learning the more and the better learning will be but it does not mean that concrete experience is the only effective experience that educators should use in transferring knowledge to the learners.

                      Like what was mentioned above, the experiences in each stages can be mixed and are interrelated thus, a balance must be achieved between concrete and abstract experiences in order to cater the and address all the need of the learners in all the domains of development and in order to help each learners in their holistic development.

                      In true sense the bands of the Edgar Dale's come are not only the types of audiovisual materials but the different experiences are also included. In fact the upper four bands like verbal symbols, visual symbols, Radio, Recordings and still pictures, and motion pictures are more related with audiovisual material but the later six bands of the Cone like exhibits, field trips, demonstration, dramatic participation are the strategies of teaching learning.

                      Contrieve Experiences and direct purposeful experiences are related with term experiences. Each division represents a stage between two extremes direct experience and pure abstraction. As we move from base of the cone to the up in order of decreasing abstraction. The based of the step learning experiences model is direct and purposeful experience which is always preferable for any new learner and any kind of learning concept and gives firsthand experience in turns leads to the permanent learning.

                      It is important to note that Dale's never intended the cone to depict to value judgement of experiences, in other words his argument was not the more concrete experiences were better that more abstract one's. It's better you apply the Dale's Cone of experience to have new progressive knowledge to teach your learners in the future. To conclude this cone of experience is essentially a visual metaphor for the idea that learning activities can be placed in broad categories based on the extent to which they convey the concrete reference of real life experiences.

Progressive teaching and learning in this 21st century its more important that we experience nowadays to come up new knowledge. It has also been interpreted by many as a prescriptive formula for selecting Instructional media. Dale's onw explanation are nebulous enough to enable a wide variety of interpretation to find support. Finally the fact that the Cone has been taken seriously enough to be use in so many ways testifies to the robustness and attractiveness of Dale's visual metaphor.