Our goal at Educational Discovery Tours is to enhance your learning experience by adding a hands on approach outside the classroom whether it be as a student or teacher. We offer tours all over the world, and we understand it is difficult to choose the right one for you. If you find yourself having trouble finding the perfect tour, this blog will offer some advice to teachers on how to find educational tours for students.
1. Consult with Administrators
For teachers, it’s important that you communicate early, clearly and often with your school administrators about school policies like permission slips, transportation, accommodations and emergency guidelines. You can also outline your plan or your ideas to the administrators and address any concerns you might have. They may also help you with the planning and logistics to make the process a little easier.
2. Decide Where You Want to Go
Once you get the OK from the administration it’s time to start planning! This is often the hardest step. There are so many phenomenal places around the world for educational tours for students with different aspects and learning opportunities. If you’re having a hard time choosing where to go try to narrow it down to a region to start with. Are you thinking East Coast? West Coast? International? Is there a specific culture or area your class is studying? To accommodate a plethora of different interests we offer destinations all over the United States as well as internationally. Our feature destinations include Disney World Orlando, New York, Washington DC, San Diego and Vancouver/Victoria. In addition, our most popular international destinations include France, Italy, England and Costa Rica.
3. Decide What Type of Tour
Chances are you already have a specific subject, class or culture you want to focus on. However, our variety of destinations and tours allows you to look at a subject through a different lense. For example, a history teacher could take their students on one of our performance tours to look at a piece of musical or theatrical history. We also offer history and educational tours as well as our special outdoor activities, parade, festival, and bowl game tours. On our website we offer some sample itineraries if you are having trouble finding a program that suits your needs.
4. Prepare
After you’ve decided on where, when and the type of tour you want it’s time to start getting ready! You can start by discussing how it relates to the curriculum. Try to spark some critical thinking discussions so the students can start to analyze the tour and its importance. You can get the students enthused by asking questions, showing pictures/videos, exploring your tour’s websites, etc. If you can it is very helpful to visit a couple sites prior to the excursion. It’s not possible for everyone because you might be going across the globe, but if you can it would be a great time to familiarize yourself with the destinations and possibly meet tour guides or curators.
You could also assign “specialist” roles for students for organizational purposes. Having specific groups to focus on different aspects of can help cover the tour wholly, and the class can discuss their findings for follow-up. Another helpful tip could be to ask open-ended observation questions that the students can brainstorm on.
Educational Discovery Tours
If you’re still having trouble finding the right educational tours for students feel free to contact us. Planning your tour can be extensive, but we are here to help to make the process go as smoothly as possible.
