March 29, 2017
Why Is Passports the Educator's Choice for Student Travel?
At passports, we have long believed in travel being an integral part of the American student’s education. But as you know, the preparation for a student tour begins long before you get on an airplane. It starts in the classroom, with you, the teachers.
Did you know that passports offers a series of comprehensive lesson plans that link the classroom directly to the overseas experience?
Many of you already structure your academic calendar with consideration to your upcoming tour and we think that’s fantastic. We also know that teachers often spend more time writing lesson plans than implementing them. That’s why we offer an extensive library of travel-related lesson plans as a free resource to all group organizers.
Collaborative, interdisciplinary, multi-dimensional lesson plans generate excitement for your trip. They engage the students in a classroom experience because they are personally invested and they can also be leveraged to gain support from your administration.
The lesson plans are targeted at your specific travel destinations. This is critical to engage the students – as you know how difficult that can be sometimes. The upcoming reality of actually visiting the places they are hearing about, the day’s lesson will be real in their mind.
Using the suggested lesson plan extensions while on tour – like finding examples of the impressions left by Spanish monarchs in the Palacio Real, or a treasure hunt in the Louvre – your students will have learned via both the abstract and concrete. That is true experiential learning built on the pillars built back home, by you, in your classroom.
These are the kinds of things students, parents, and administrators can get excited about.
Which brings up another point – gaining the support of your administration can sometimes be a challenge. In the thousands of trips that we have run at passports, we have found that the closer the classroom experience matches the overseas experience, the more supportive school administrators become. They want to see the trip as part of the curriculum. You can make this point by showing the lesson plans that were strategically designed to not only engage the students, but also to satisfy and exceed curriculum standards.
Each of our lesson plans contain: an academic summary, listing of standards compliance, objectives, materials if applicable, a procedure that encourages critical thinking, the on-tour extensions that we talked about, relevant research links, key terms, and worksheets/homework sheets when appropriate.
Consider the lesson plans a token of our appreciation for all you do. The students who explore the world through passports are not accidental tourists. Their extraordinary journeys are accomplished only because of the pro-active, dedicated support of teachers like you.
Passports was created by educators. That’s why we strive to be the educator’s first choice for student travel.
