The Most Underrated Learning Strategy Around

What if all learning depended on the field trip? You remember field trips. Those glorious events where you were able to escape from your mundane classroom and experience the world. I didn’t get to go on a lot of them, but when I was part of a field trip, learning was engaging, exciting, and fun.

Awhile back (May of 2022), The Atlantic published an article announcing that the field trip was making a comeback – post-pandemic. The article, written by Rowan Moore Gerety, begins,

“You could hear them getting antsy through the bus windows. ‘I want to see a meerkat!’ ‘Finally, I get to feel my feet!’ And a deeper voice, just as emphatic: ‘SIT! DOWN!’ It was a little after 10 a.m. on May 6 when three busloads of third graders poured out into the heat of a dusty parking lot at Out of Africa, a wildlife part about 90 miles north of Phoenix, Arizona. As a billboard had promised us on I-17, here in the high desert scrub, next to the Yavapai County jail: Adventure awaits.”

…

“AMS Glendale, a charter school in a working-class suburb of Phoenix, is more than two-thirds Hispanic; many parents are immigrants. About 80 percent of the students qualify for free- or reduced-price lunch. For most of the kids, this was their first field trip since before the pandemic; for some, it was their first field trip ever; for a few, it was their very first taste of Arizona beyond the edge of Phoenix’s sprawl. The school had been building anticipation for weeks with lessons about mammals and vertebrates, and a ‘habitat diorama’ project planned for the kids’ return. I doubted whether Out of Africa, with its chain-link fencing and lethargic rhino, was the best place to learn about habitats, but the value of an outing to break the kids’ collective cabin fever was impossible to miss.”

“Field trips have been on the decline in American schools since well before the pandemic, much like art and music classes, and even recess. Administrators cite the usual culprits: money, instructional time. And research about the educational value of visiting zoos and museums has been mixed – sometimes kids aren’t even aware of what teachers hope for them to learn. But another strand of scholarship broadens the lens: It may be less important to absorb the particulars of what makes an ungulate an ungulate that it is to simply lay eyes on a giraffe, and, as a result, find yourself more interested in science than you were the day before.”

…

“…When a squirrel crept along the fence line to see what the fracas was about, one student shouted, ‘The squirrel! The squirrel!’ This pattern repeated itself throughout the day as we explored the park on foot – outbursts of euphoria triggered by things that seemed impossibly mundane. Yes, the kids screamed at the baby tigers splashing around a shallow pond with their handlers, but they screamed just as loudly at the sight of lizards crossing the road, a daily sight in Phoenix at this time of year. I remembered how invigorated I’d felt on the few occasions in the past year when I’d been surrounded by the freewheeling energy of a crowd – high in the stands at a WNBA game or dancing at a friend’s wedding. In this case, the crowd was one the kids saw almost every day, but schools are like airports or offices; your visits unfold on somebody else’s terms. Here, perhaps for the first time in years, they were out in force and (relatively) free to set their own agenda.”

When I was in elementary school, my Cub Scout den took a trip to my town’s water plant. It was fascinating! I saw first-hand how water was prepared for my drinking, cooking, and bathing. But after the trip, I still had questions about that water plant. How did you get to work there? Was water prepared differently for drinking versus bathing? Was the water supply ever tainted with bad stuff that made the H2O unsafe?

I never returned to that water plant and it was one block from where I lived.

When The Atlantic’s Rowant Gerety wrote, “Here, perhaps for the first time in years, they [the young learners] were out in force and (relatively) free to set their own agenda,” that made me think about all of the “field trips” I’ve taken in my life when I wanted to learn even more than what I learned on a two-hour visit. But I went back to school – to another’s learning agenda.

What would happen if all learning was built around field trips? Would kids do worse on tests? Or, would they embrace their own learning and demonstrate the passion required for any deep learning to occur?

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. SVB