The writer Samuel Johnson once said: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
It’s a statement that is equally true of many other great cities, and for educators working in international schools around the world, it is a sentiment that should encourage ideas around how to make the most educational use of these living resources.
At Southbank International School this idea of using London as a classroom is a concept built into our International Baccalaureate curriculum to help augment students’ learning outcomes.
To do this, teachers look at their curriculum throughout the year and seek out places of interest that will spark curiosity and help with students’ inquiries to build into their planning. At other times they may facilitate a trip at short notice in response to students’ questions.
How to use school visits in cities to boost learning
It can lead to some very memorable moments and great learning opportunities - but it does take some planning to get it right, so here are six tips based on our experiences.
1. Don’t just choose the obvious places for school visits
If you’re in a big city, there will be many tourist attractions. However, a good starting point to ensure that activities are engaging for pupils - many of whom may be locals, after all - is to seek out less well-known locations.
For example, our students visit Brompton Cemetery, the burial place of many great historical figures such as suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, and this provides a fantastic setting for an immersive history lesson.
Such locations may not always have obvious information about hosting school trips but the key is just to ask - a quick phone call or email can usually yield a positive response.
2. Make trips as practical as possible
The key to a successful and interesting trip is to make it as practical as possible for the students.
Each year our Grade 5 students visit the Royal Courts of Justice, where they are tasked with acting out the prosecution and defence for a trial of a specific crime.
The students are provided with a skeleton script that enables them to add their own defence and prosecution questions, all coordinated by an external expert in the law, who has a real passion for their subject and is trained in education provision.
Another example involved students walking through Notting Hill for a unit on “How we Organise Ourselves” to learn more about the history of the area, drawing on the knowledge and expertise of local residents along the way.
To further enhance the students’ learning, one of our teachers, who grew up in Notting Hill and plays in a steel pan drum band, took them to their rehearsal rooms to let them play on the drums, explaining the related history of migration from the Caribbean.
3. Look beyond the curriculum
While it’s important to ensure that trips enrich the students’ learning, you shouldn’t be limited by only what is relevant to the curriculum.
For example, one of our history teachers leads the London Exploration Society - an after-school club where students explore in a leisurely but informed way the architecture, aesthetics, culture past and present and history of London.
While not linked directly to the curriculum, each week students are taken on a different tour, with the first term’s sessions focused on visiting London’s smaller museums, such as Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Hunterian Museum, the UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology and the Fishmongers’ Company.
The spring and summer terms consist of outside walks, encouraging students to look up as they walk the streets to discover the hidden corners of famous neighbourhoods, including the squares of Islington, the mews of Paddington and the great London cemeteries, with students hearing tales of some of their permanent inhabitants.
4. Work with an expert
While teachers are masters in their fields of study, it’s often a good idea to engage with local experts, too.
For example, during a focus on religion our Grade 4 students visited a mosque, a church and a synagogue, where they spoke with religious leaders to discover more about their beliefs and practices, and were given tours of the different buildings, discovering things that teachers alone would not have been able to find.
Similarly, our students in Grade 5 have been learning about primary and secondary sources in history, and were taken to the River Thames for an archaeological dig, led by an archaeologist who had extensive knowledge of the local area and its history and could identify the findings, the eras they came from and so on.
This exercise stimulated curiosity in our students in a way that would not have been possible in the classroom alone, or without the archaeologist’s knowledge.
5. Don’t forget your parent community
Thinking about trips to lesser-known locations or those usually closed to the public may sound like a lot of work but using your parent community can be a great way to overcome this and, for us, it resulted in some fascinating opportunities.
For example, at Southbank parents are asked to share what they know as part of each unit and their area of expertise, whether they work for a corporate, in the media, the arts or for local government.
From this, we have had one group of students visit the banking offices of a parent to learn about the different roles and responsibilities of staff there and how the industry operates, while another group visited a parent’s architect studio.
With new pupils and their parents joining your school community all the time, this is a potentially never-ending source of new and inspiring ideas.
6. Involve students in the planning process
While there’s no end to the benefits of getting out and about, the reality is that it’s all too easy for school trips to be run badly, particularly when taking a standard format, such as a museum visit with a template worksheet to fill out.
The key, then, is to centre the trip around the students and what they want to find out before setting off.
We take this open-ended inquiry approach with all our trips, posing the question to students: what do you want to find out today?
By giving students the independence to consider their own questions, we can help to nurture exploration and discovery and an inclination to further develop their thinking.
When students are given autonomy around what they want to learn, they benefit from a far richer experience overall - and they should never be left feeling “tired” by whatever city they live and study in.
Siobhan McGrath is executive principal of Southbank International School in London
