CanadaApril 27, 2015 | 3 min read
Traveling with students requires a different mindset from ordinary tourism. Teachers balance safety, supervision, educational goals, group energy, communication, and their own wellbeing throughout the trip. It is not like a field trip to the symphony. It is not like a holiday with friends. You are responsible for the safety and wellbeing of a group of young people in an unfamiliar country. Responsible for the educational outcomes you have promised their school and their parents. Responsible for your own energy and equanimity across what can be an intense ten days.
The teachers who do this well have developed a set of practices that make the difference. Here is what they have learned.
One of the practical advantages of a customised tour is that you can shape the itinerary around your curriculum and your students. Before you finalise the programme with your tour consultant, ask students what they most want to see and do. Give them a list of possibilities and have them research and rank their top choices.
This process accomplishes two things: it gives students ownership over the trip before it starts. Increases their engagement when they arrive, and it surfaces information about your group that helps you build a better itinerary. Students who have chosen to visit a site are more attentive at that site than students who are taken there. Our France: Cultural Tour and all other Prométour itineraries are built to accommodate this kind of teacher-led customisation.
Students who arrive at a destination knowing something about it in advance engage with it more deeply than those who encounter it cold. A two-week classroom unit connecting the curriculum to the specific sites on the itinerary. A reading list, a short film, or a preparatory project, significantly changes the quality of attention students bring to the experience.
For language trips, this includes targeted vocabulary preparation: students who can ask for directions, order food. Navigate a museum in the target language before they arrive have a qualitatively different trip from those who cannot.
An itinerary packed with museum visits and guided tours from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. every day is a formula for student fatigue and diminishing returns. The most experienced travelling teachers alternate between structured, high-attention activities, a museum visit, a guided historical tour, a performance. Activities that allow for more relaxed, incidental learning.
A morning in a market, a free afternoon in a neighbourhood, lunch at a local restaurant with no agenda. The rhythm matters as much as the content. Students who are not exhausted pay more attention, remember more, and are easier to manage.
A structured free afternoon, with a meeting point, a budget. The expectation that students will navigate independently, is consistently reported as one of the highlights of any student trip. The task of getting from point A to point B in a foreign city, reading a menu in another language.
Making decisions as a small group without adult direction develops a specific kind of competence and confidence. Teachers who include at least one free period of this kind tend to say it produces the most visible growth they observe on the trip.
The difference between a student trip and a tourist experience is the depth of human contact. Build opportunities into the itinerary for students to interact with local people outside of formal guided contexts. A school visit, a cooking class with a local chef, a homestay dinner, a conversation with a market vendor.
These interactions, even when they are brief and halting because of the language gap. Are often the experiences students describe most vividly when they return. They are also the ones that most directly challenge students’ assumptions about life in other places.
Structured reflection is one of the most effective ways to consolidate what students are experiencing. A daily journal requirement does not need to be long. Three to five sentences about what they saw, what surprised them. What they want to know more about is enough to create a record that students return to.
For language teachers, the journal can be written in the target language. For all teachers, the journals become a post-trip resource. They feed into essays, presentations, and discussions in the weeks after the trip. They give students a personal document of an experience that deserves to be documented.
The most effective post-trip learning happens quickly. Within the first week of return, while the experiences are still vivid, hold a structured debrief. What was most surprising, what challenged your assumptions, what do you understand differently now than you did before. These conversations, when they are structured and taken seriously, produce the kind of reflective insight that justifies the trip to parents, administrators.
School boards. They also help students articulate the value of the experience to themselves. Is the most durable form of learning.
A class trip is most educationally valuable when it is treated as a unit of the curriculum rather than an interruption to it. Curriculum connections should be explicit before the trip, active during it. Followed up in the weeks after return. Students who write a history essay using sites they have visited, complete a language assignment drawing on conversations they had abroad. Or present on an aspect of the destination’s culture that they investigated independently.
Consolidate their learning in a way that a trip treated as a standalone experience does not produce. The trip should change what you are able to do in the classroom when you return. If it does not, it was probably not designed carefully enough.
Prométour supports teachers through every stage of the trip, from initial planning and school board approval through the tour itself and the post-trip documentation. Browse destinations likeFrance, Spain, or Québec to start planning. Then reach out and we will guide you through every step. The curriculum connections and logistical support available make this one of the most rewarding programmes to build.
