Who doesn’t love a field trip, right?
Honestly?
Oftentimes, teachers don’t.
I organized far more than my fair share of field trips over my three decades in the classroom, from local day trips to overnights to week-long trips requiring air travel. I navigated the time-consuming challenges inherent to off-campus experiential learning because I know that when students are set up for success with articulated expectations around how to engage, a structured, meaningful task to complete on the trip, and a clear understanding of how the experience will be connected to their past and future learning, field trips can be invaluable, defining experiences in a student’s educational journey.
That said, the enormity of the work required to interact with the site, manage logistics like bus forms and permission slips, prepare students, support learning while on the trip, and do something constructive upon return to the classroom feels daunting even to seasoned teachers, which is why I’ve constructed a protocol that every teacher can use to optimize every field trip.
Let’s “practice” my protocol using a type of field trip that can feel especially fraught: visiting an art museum.
Trips to an art museum can strike fear into the heart of even the most stalwart among us teachers because, well, there’s a lot of art there– precious, irreplaceable art– and kids are…kids. Plus, if you aren’t an art teacher, you might feel challenged to come up with an activity that connects to your subject area, but since visiting an art museum can be one of the most impactful learning experiences in a student’s educational journey, let’s run the protocol using a field trip to the RISD Museum around which I designed a unit for a group of middle schoolers. Again, you can use this protocol no matter what type of experiential learning experience you are designing for your students.
Step One- Identify Objectives
My goal was to develop a novel approach to teaching figurative language and free verse poetry. By the end of the experience, my students would be able to define, identify, and create their own examples of figurative language. Furthermore, I wanted students to understand that poetry relies on figurative language to create imagery and convey meaning. And, yes, I wanted them to compose their own free verse poetry.
Step Two- Construct an Experience
While I realize that many teachers are tasked with building curriculum around an experience like an annual trip to the local repertory theater, planetarium, or history museum, ideally, the choice of experience would be based on the learning objectives.
I discovered the perfect field trip experience by accident on a visit to the RISD Museum where they had just opened a special exhibit entitled, “Inventing Impressionism.” I had my “Ah hah!” moment when I encountered the short definition of Impressionism at the entrance to the exhibit.
Turns out that Impressionist painting and poetry are constructed in stunningly similar ways! This became the concept for the Artwork to Poetry unit. For this unit, students interacted with the artwork at the museum and then wrote their own poetry back at school. To prepare my students, I designed a few weeks of instruction that taught students the history of the Impressionist Movement, the definition of Impressionism, and how to identify Impressionist paintings. Students reviewed figurative language and explored how to use Impressionist paintings to create their own examples of figurative language. Students then used the figurative language they created to co-write and independently compose free verse poems.
Step Three- Preview & Practice
In general, teachers do a fabulous job of previewing the activity and clarifying behavior expectations prior to a trip by explaining what students will do on the trip, clarifying what the expectations will be, and introducing students to any requirements or restrictions the site might ask them to preview.
What tends to get overlooked is practice. You want your students to be familiar with the tasks they will do at the site. This can be achieved by running a pre-trip practice session and then explaining how the learning they do at the site will be applied upon their return to school. For this experience, I created a mock-up of a museum with “works of art” for the students to use to complete the exact same questions they would encounter in the packet at the museum. By the end of class, my students had mastered the tasks and gained a clear vision of what they would be doing and why.
This practice session gave me the opportunity to provide direct instruction to all students on the directions for each section of the packet and to model what a complete response looks like for each activity. Given that we were visiting an art museum, where they keep all that fabulous and fragile art, the practice session also gave students a chance to practice how to be in a museum without actually having to be in the space itself.
I encourage you to leave time to reflect as a class at the end of your practice session to celebrate what went well that they should replicate at the actual site and to address any challenges.
Step 4- Have the Experience
Maximize everyone’s experience. We want our students to have a great experience, yet teachers can’t micromanage every aspect of a field trip. We cannot be everywhere at once, so make sure those who need additional adult guidance, either for support with academics or self-regulation, have an adult assigned to assist.
Step 5- Do Something Meaningful
If you are asking your students to do a cross-curricular project to show their learning, it is ideal to complete project work in every class to which that learning connects. I was fortunate to have a wonderful art teacher who was willing to dedicate instructional time for this project. Once students finished their projects, they created an exhibit of their own, held an art show opening, and then reflected on their learning.
Explore the student workbook and curriculum guide for the project, here!
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