Why Educational Trips Should Be More Than Sightseeing

Most school trips abroad are enjoyable. Fewer of them are educational. The difference is rarely the destination — it is whether anybody decided, in advance, what students were supposed to learn.

Sightseeing asks nothing of a student

A guided walk past a monument produces a photograph and a vague sense of having been somewhere. It asks students to receive, not to participate. Nothing is required of them, so nothing much changes.

An educational experience puts a demand on the student: a question to answer, a task to complete, a person to interview, a position to defend afterwards. That demand is what converts a visit into learning.

The test is what happens after

A useful question to ask of any proposed activity is simple: what will a student be able to do, explain or argue afterwards that they could not before?

If the honest answer is “they will have seen it”, the activity is filler. That does not always make it wrong — some rest and enjoyment belongs in every itinerary — but it should not be mistaken for the educational content of the trip.

Purpose has to be designed in, not added on

Purpose cannot be retrofitted to a finished itinerary. It has to come first:

• Decide the objective. What should students understand, or be able to do, by the end?
• Choose experiences that serve it. Institutions, workshops and people, not just places.
• Build in participation. Questions, tasks, roles and responsibilities.
• Make space for reflection. Ten minutes at the end of each day does more than an extra excursion.

Students can tell the difference

Students know when they are being entertained and when they are being taken seriously. The programmes they talk about years later are almost never the ones with the most attractions — they are the ones where somebody expected something of them, and they discovered they could deliver it.

That is the standard we design to. See how we build a programme, or explore our school programmes.