Whilst educational tour packages often highlight the benefits for students, we at Educational Journeys believe in creating experiences that provide a range of benefits for teachers as well. Here we highlight five ways teachers can benefit from conducting an educational tour.
1. Educational tours provide the opportunity to improve teaching practice
Educational tours provide unique opportunities for teachers to continue to craft their teaching practice. The inclusion of immersive experiences allows teachers to broaden the scope of their syllabus and utilise different teaching styles and strategies whilst being in a targeted environment.
Teaching strategies that can be developed on an immersive school tour include:
- Collaboration: Educational tours provide a huge number of opportunities for student collaboration. Teachers can create opportunities for students to form groups, negotiate roles and undertake tasks. Additionally, teachers can differentiate experiences, tasks and contexts within the tour environment based on the needs of individual groups. Collaborative opportunities also allow teachers to develop further insight into the personal and social capabilities of students.
- Explicit teaching: Educational tours provide the perfect conditions for explicit teaching, with multiple opportunities for teachers to model key skills, such as fieldwork, data and sample collection and the use of GPS technologies. Teachers can provide opportunities for students to practice skills and provide real-time feedback and further explicit instruction, scaffolding and modelling where required. Furthermore, teachers can link the skills practiced on the tour to key learning objectives and success criteria.
- Multiple exposures: There is a significant volume of evidence that supports the teaching strategy of multiple exposures as supporting the establishment of deep learning. Research has shown that it requires ‘three or four experiences involving interaction with relevant information for a new knowledge construct to be created in working memory and then transferred to long-term memory’ A tailored educational tour allows teachers to facilitate multiple exposures to key knowledge, for example, examining the impact of human interactions with the natural environment or tracking star movements across multiple evenings. Throughout the course of the tour students have the opportunity to review key knowledge and practice skills, as well as teachers being able to start a feedback loop with the student.
Additionally, teachers gain multiple opportunities to practice and refine these teaching strategies over the course of the educational tour, with the benefit of being able to bring these refined strategies back to the classroom to strengthen on-campus teaching practice.
2. Educational tours create unique assessment opportunities
Increasingly, teachers are looking to create authentic, meaningful assessment opportunities for students. An educational tour provides multiple opportunities for formative assessment, whilst also providing stimulus material for summative assessments on return to school. Research into experiential activities has produced findings that show students feel that these experiences have a positive impact on their understanding of the curriculum content, as well as demonstrating improved performance on report writing summative assessment tasks on return to school.
By engaging with experiences relating to curriculum content, teachers are able to gain further insight into the level of student understanding of key content and skills. Teachers can discuss an experience with students and assess their ability to apply the key learnings of the experience to the content they have learnt in the classroom. For example, during a tour focusing on the histories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, can a student then clearly explain the impact of colonisation? Alternatively, can they demonstrate that they have an understanding of the different interpretations of the impact of the arrival of European colonists?
Teachers also have the opportunity to measure student skill progression. With tours lasting multiple days, teachers are able to look for greater granularity in student progression. Observations can be made about the ability to conduct field work, take detailed field notes, apply appropriate scientific terminology to a biome, use GPS technology to accurately determine location, label and organise photos.
An educational tour also provides the opportunity for greater student agency through the development of self-structured research and investigation projects. Students can create their own line of inquiry questions, and, using the rich experiences provided on the tour, undertake research investigations that are in line with their area of interest. Further supporting student agency, students potentially can be involved with the planning of the tour, and curate a series of experiences that will best support their inquiry.
3. Educational tours allow teachers to build skills and create networks
Teachers can gain valuable experience in researching and planning for an educational tour and embedding the experience into the wider school teaching and learning program. This has wide ranging benefits in that not only does the teacher develop the capacity to coordinate curriculum aligned educational tours, but can also cite experience coordinating programs when looking to apply for future leadership roles. Additionally, for some teachers, there are limited opportunities to practice the key skills that they teach. Educational tours provide the opportunity for skills practice in a real-life setting and allows teachers to upskill alongside their students.
Teachers can engage in professional learning through conversations with experts, observing key concepts from the curriculum in the field and conducting research prior to conducting the educational tour. This professional learning better engages the teacher with their subject area and provides an additional knowledge base to draw from when teaching in the classroom.
Educational tours allow teachers to form networks and long-term relationships with key organisations and experts. Additionally, teachers can potentially create opportunities for students to continue to engage with these networks remotely in the future. With increasing levels of access to video conferencing technology, students could continue to communicate with experts, sharing findings, discussing hypotheses and following up on projects.
Teachers can support the professional learning of colleagues through sharing their knowledge gained on an educational tour. This can be done through publishing articles about their experiences, sharing their key learnings at staff, team and network meetings and presenting at conferences. This shared learning opportunity can in turn lead to other teachers becoming more confident in engaging their students with an educational tour.
4. Educational tours help foster connection and positive relationships
Educational trips allow for the provision of collaborative group tasks and team building. Often teachers engage with group work within the classroom, but more often than not this is limited by the timetable structure. An educational tour allows for an extended period of group work and collaboration, providing an unsurpassed opportunity for team building as students and teachers navigate a new environment and the inevitable challenges that can come with travel.
Educational tours also allow teachers to form stronger bonds with their students. With extended time together comes additional opportunities to get to know one another on a more personal level, there’s time to swap stories, personal experiences and work together to overcome challenges. Often relationships formed on these tours are long lasting and positive benefits linger for years to come.
Educational tours allow teachers to support students in pushing their limits and learning about boundaries and capabilities. With visible wellbeing increasingly forming a part of our school curricula, these experiences provide a range of teaching opportunities that relate to growing resilience, forming positive relationships, setting boundaries and cultivating gratitude. Teachers can also gain deeper insights into student strengths and better evaluate where students need additional support.
5. Educational tours are fun and make memories
More than anything, educational tours are FUN! The thrill of travel, of leaving home and embarking on a new adventure is so incredibly powerful in itself. Students love getting out into the world, seeing new sights, learning new things, and even more learning about themselves and each other. Moreover, students greatly appreciate it when teachers provide them with these opportunities.
Educational tours create lasting memories, when we engage with a truly unique experience, we remember the sights, sounds, smells and stories like it was yesterday. Teachers can continue to draw on these memories through the school year and link back to classroom curriculum. There’s great power in those “remember when” moments; remember when we saw the plastic on the beach, remember when we heard the story from Tom, remember when we saw the different layers of rock…
Teachers can then use “remember when” moments to link back to what they are studying. Teachers can ask students to recall real life examples of a concept from the tour and students can draw on their photos, sketches, recollections and observations to do so. Teachers can use these moments to better develop student understanding and improve assessment performance.
Are you ready to find out more about our education tours? Check out our student programs.