Educational school trips are beneficial for the progression of a student’s development to build the necessary social skills and an opportunity to see what they learn in the classroom out there in the real world. Taking educational trips also improves student confidence and engagement in the classroom.
A US-based study found that regardless of ethnicity, economic status, or gender, students that take educational trips have a 59% higher chance of getting better grades. These rates increase drastically for high school students to 95% and college to 63%. It is important for educators, parents, and students themselves to do the utmost to plan, organize, and attend educational trips when the right opportunity arises.
Planning an educational trip
It is important to plan the right trip to enable your students to get the most relevant experiences that closely relate to your curriculum. Thus, it is important that educators consider what they want out of the trip for their students. Thinking about learning objectives and how they will be met during the trip is important at maximizing time and ensuring your effort does not go to waste from a learning perspective. It is important that educators do not try to plan and see every little attraction that a city has to offer but they only go specifically to attractions that will offer the best learning environment for their subject. This means that students spend more time where they need to be and thus it is also less stressful to try and fit everything onto the schedule.
Being proactive and teaching your students a lesson that is relevant to the trip that they will be going on is very important to keep them engaged. It is also important that a teacher is well informed about the trip they are going on whether they go to a science museum, a laboratory, or a play. Students need to be taught the relevance of the trip before actually going on it. This gives them confidence and improves their curiosity by establishing a link by the lessons taught in the classroom to the real world. When they come back, it is important that they realize in the future that all things taught in the classroom are relevant to the real world.
Working with a tour company catering to educational trips
Besides planning for risk assessments, permission slips, and payments. It is important that educators use the right provider that specializes in educational trips especially when going to a foreign country. A good travel provider will suggest the best activities and schedule travel locations best catering to the lessons that you want to teach your students, according to the experts behind adaptabletravel.co.uk. To improve on efficiency for the sake of limited time available, it is important to engage on a wider range of subjects that will provide wider benefits for personal development outcomes such as resilience, independence, confidence, and teamwork.
Some travel agencies can also help influence the activities that you can incorporate when the students return to their classrooms. If your travel group is small and you want your students to engage with others, the options for joining your efforts together with students from another group can be accommodated by the proper travel agency. Tour organizers can best help you with maximizing your time in the least amount of days because they can provide you with the best transportation methods and organizing them, as well as, the best locations where your students can sleep overnight in.
Incorporating technology
To keep students engaged during your trip it is important that the trip is exploratory in nature. Meaning your students are off the classroom or labs and out there in the field walking, seeing, touching, hearing, and feeling their experiences. Most students nowadays are very in touch with their mobile devices, so incorporating them as part of your lesson plan is important. For example, nowadays phones have many applications that aid the students in taking notes, linking them to a story, and/or organizing the photos that they take.
Some applications cater to giving a voice-guided tour especially if you plan to attend popular world museums and attractions. For example, if you are on an art trip and will be visiting St. Peter’s Basilica in Italy, an application that provides a voice tour on how all the art was created and the meaning behind it inside the basilica aids students in getting the right information as you go.
It is important that educators properly plan well before the actual trip, in fact, before the school year even begins. Planning should be established into the curriculum so that students can learn beforehand what they are about to see in real life and also express what they learned after their trip with the proper classroom activities. Planning and working with tour organizers that specialize in educational field trips helps tremendously in time management and its effectiveness.
