field trip

Field Trips

What is a Field Trip and Why Take Them?

A field trip is defined as any teaching and learning excursion outside of the classroom or a field trip is a structured activity that occurs outside the classroom. It can be a brief observational activity or a longer more sustained investigation or project.

Field trips can connect schoolwork with the world, making it tangible and memorable. A field trip stimulates questions and ideas at the beginning or end of a unit. Field trips also provide an experiential "text" for students to study and interrogate.

There are two types of field trips – Physical and Virtual

Virtual field trip

A virtual field trip is taken via technology. A student can take a virtual tour of a museum, for instance, through the Internet. Students can ask a virtual tour guide questions via Instant Messenger or through a camera and sound interface. Through a virtual tour, a student can experience a field-trip destination through images and sounds instead of actually visiting such an attraction or a virtual field trip (VFT) is collection of websites, images, video clips and other forms of digital media that enhance student learning by enabling them to experience a place or time period without actually being there.

Physical/Live Field Trips

A live or a physical field trip involves physically taking students to see a particular site or attraction. This can involve transportation, managing a large group of students and other difficulties. However, a traditional field trip allows students to see a sight firsthand and likely touch and interact with some areas. This full interaction is something that is not available virtually.

Why field trip?

• To make a connection between reality and theory – hands-on
• Can be used as an introduction to a unit or a culminating actively.
• To provide an authentic learning experience
• Exciting, children get to meet and interact with others
• They can experience all five senses, see, touch, feel, smell, taste
• Children remember the field trips because they learn using different methodology

Producer/steps of field trip learning

•  Plan with children as much as possible

• Involve school principal and vice-principal
• Ensure field trip compliments the curriculum by meeting specific expectations
• Ensure students have necessary background knowledge prior to field trip, if introduction to field trip provide essential preparatory information in order to prepare students for the experience
• Plan post-trip activities that build on the knowledge gained in partaking in the field trip (eg. reports, displays, photos, graphs).
• Prepare a checklist to ensure that all tasks are completed (e.g. booking facilities and transportation, parental notifications, medical forms, supervision, safety precautions, emergency information) and have the school administrator sign the checklist once completed.
• Be sure to visit the site ahead of time, in order to plan for safety, resources and resource personnel, facility.
• Plan on route activities to enrich their experience during the field trip.
• Provide parents with rationalization for the field trip and trip itinerary.

Merits of the field trip

•  Hand –on ,real world experiences
• Quality of education, attitudes to learning and motivation towards the subject.
• Improvement of the socialization between students, which would impinge on the classroom and development of rapport/relationship between teacher s and students.
•  Enabling teachers to utilize other learning strategies such as cooperative learning.
• Students learn better as there is change in the teaching method.

Demerits of the field trip

•  Expensive, difficulties with transportation, including cost. 
•  Time consideration – preparation, fitting into the school timetable. 
• Lack of support from school administrations to field trips. 
• Poor student behavior and attitudes (loss over students) . 
• Inadequacy of resources and choice of venue. 
• Medical risk.

Benefits of Field Trips

• Field trips bring classroom study alive for students and help them remember and relate to what they have learned. They provide rich resources that can rarely be approximated in the classroom. They also help connect school to the world.
• Field trips provide new cultural contexts for literature and provoke questions.
• Field trips stimulate and focus class work by helping students synthesize information.

Guidelines for Safety and Behavior

• There are many potential liability situations that can occur on a field trip, it is your ultimate responsibility to ensure that the following safety guidelines are meet concerning safety and behavior while outside the classroom.
• Set behavioral expectations for the field trip and describe and discuss them with the children prior to departure.
• Have children create their own code of behavior with teacher involvement and veto power.
• If junior students are mature enough to be responsible and accountable for their own behavior, have them sign a written code of conduct; therefore, creating a behavioral contract.
• Introduce the idea of team work to enable students to live to the written code of conduct.
• Describe the consequences for not behaving properly prior to embarking on the trip.
• Provide parents with behavioral expectations and ask them to ensure that the children know and understand the code of conduct and the consequences.
• Create passenger manifest and file with appropriate school personnel.  Also, take along passenger manifest to check that everyone is accounted for.
• Implement a buddy with students as an additional safety precaution.
• Ensure that safety gear and first aid equipment are readily available and in plain view.

ROLE OF TEACHER

Before the Trip, Teachers Should:

• Visit the site to find connections to curricula, assess potential problems, and plan how the students could best use their time.
• Give as much context as possible so that the students will understand what they see. Teachers might consider having the students do something like a journal or a K/W/L chart in which they list questions they have, expectations for their visit, or plans for ways to use what they will see.
• Create a trip sheet like Stanlee Brimberg's that prompts students to draw, write responses, answer questions, or find items for a "scavenger hunt" of the location. This sheet, however, should not be so directive that the students can't see and respond to the site in their own ways.
• Set standards of etiquette and respectful behavior.

During the Trip, Teachers Should:

• Build in opportunities for students to view the site or work alone, in pairs, or in small groups. On a trip to a museum, for example, the students could be asked an open-ended question like, "Find a work that represents our theme or time period and sketch it. In class we will share our choices and discuss why we chose them." The students could also choose one aspect or part of the site to explore.
• Consider giving some students disposable cameras, small tape recorders, or mandates to record specific information. When the class is back at school, they can compile a complete picture.

After the Trip:

• Allow the students to synthesize their experience creatively. For example, they might create trip brochures for other classes or the school library. They might create children's books about a theme from the field trip. Or they might present their experience orally to another class or grade.

Games and Simulation

Games and simulation

Games involve some kind of competition, either of player against, or player against chance or luck. Simulations are abstractions of a real situation, in streamline or miniature versions. Simulations provide roles and rules, after which the players construct their own reality. Games are designed to be won. Simulations are designed to place the players in quasi-realistic roles which stimulate what might happen in real life.

A simulation is a form of experiential learning. Simulations are instructional scenarios where the learner is placed in a "world" defined by the teacher. They represent a reality within which students interact. The teacher controls the parameters of this "world" and uses it to achieve the desired instructional results. Simulations are in way, a lab experiment where the students themselves are the test subjects. They experience the reality of the scenario and gather meaning from it. It is a strategy that fits well with the principles of constructivism.

Simulations promote the use of critical and evaluative thinking. The ambiguous or open ended nature of a simulation encourages students to contemplate the implications of a scenario. The situation feels real and thus leads to more engaging interaction by learners. They are motivating activities enjoyed by students of all ages.

When students use a model of behavior to gain a better understanding of that behavior, they are doing a simulation. For example:

·         When students take on the roles of party delegates to a political convention and run the model convention, they are learning about the election process by simulating a political convention. Students often use simulations to make predictions about the social, economic, or natural world.

CONCEPT OF GAMES AND SIMULATION

·         Simulation can be used to teach theory, assessment and skills.

·         Simulation has been successfully used as a teaching strategy in both critical &formal education.

·         The aviation, transportation & nuclear power industries & the social & behavioral sciences have all used simulation to teach concepts.

·         Learning in adults is most effective when the environment is both participative & interactive.

·         Another important feature is that learners receive immediate feedback.

·         Simulation is an excellent teaching &evaluation method for critical care and also for enhancing &evaluating critical thinking and problem solving.

·         It helps a learner to explore, navigate or obtain more information about that system.

·         Simulation is useful teaching strategy for illustrating a complex & changing situation.

·         In simulation, the learner acts, the simulation reacts, the learner learns from this feedback.

Why Games and Simulation.

·         It is motivating and realistic.

·         It is learner-centered.

·         It enhances cooperation among peers.

·         It develops higher-cognitive skills of all types.

• It develops interpersonal and social skills.
• It promotes psychomotor skills.
• It promotes multi-faceted skills related to real life.
• It enhances the development of values and attitudes in children.

Purpose of Games and simulation

·         Simulation promotes the use of critical and evaluative thinking.

·         They encourage students to contemplate the implication of a scenario.

·         The situation feels real and thus leads to more engaging interaction by learner.

·         Simulation promotes concept attainment through experiential practice.

·         Simulation help student appreciate more deeply the management of the environment, politics, community and culture.

For example:

 By participating in a chocolate distribution activity. The student might gain an understanding of inequity in society.

·         Simulation can reinforce other skills indirectly.

.ADVANTAGES

·         It provides an opportunity to apply learning to new and rewarding situation which allows for new discoveries.

·         Learner becomes active participants in the learning process.

·         Motivation among participations as they act out specific scenario.

·         Discussions are realistic as they focus on observed behaviors.

·         Enjoyable motivating activity.

·         Promote critical thinking.

·         Enhance appreciation of the more subtle aspects of a concept.

·         Self confidence.

DIS-ADVANTAGES

·         Preparation time.

·         Cost can be an issue.

·         Assessment is more complex situations can occur with the learner.

·         Some may feel embarrassed if they are unfamiliar with the problems associated with the simulation exercise.

PRINCIPLES

·         The teacher shall not evaluate the participants’ decisions and moves.

·         The teacher facilitates students understanding and interpretation of rules.

·         The teacher shall encourage participation and help students cope with uncertainty.

·         The teacher shall intervene when required to ensure/facilitate the smooth progress simulation.

PROCEDURAL STEPS

FIRST STAGE: Establishing your objectives

Before you start to think about choosing an exercise, you should be quite clear as to the job that you want the exercise to do. This is best done by asking you the following questions:

·         With whom is the exercise to be used?

·         For what basic purpose?

·         What specific educational objectives or learning outcomes do you want to achieve?

SECOND STAGE: Deciding what type of exercise is to be used.

Once you have established your educational objectives or learning outcomes, you should then give some thought as to what type of exercise you think would be best suited to helping you to achieve these. Specially, you should ask yourself the following questions:

·         What basic type of exercise do you think would be suitable?(a case study? A simulation/game? A role playing simulation?)

·         What format of exercise do you want to use? (A simple manual exercise? A board game?  A computer simulation?)

THIRD STAGE: Choosing a specific exercise

Once you have made your mind about the basic type and format of the exercise that you would like to use, you should then set about the task of seeing whether exercises of the type you want are in fact available, and if so, choosing the one that you feel would be most suitable to meet your needs. The tasks should again be tackled by seeking the answer to a number of questions:

·          Is a suitable exercise is not available (in house), could such an exercise be obtained from an external source?

·         Is an exercise (manual or electronic) of the type you want available (in house) within your own establishment or within any larger organization of which it forms a part? (If it is, get hold of it and use it.)

Role Play

What is Role Playing?

In role playing, students act out characters in a predefined "situation".

Concept of role playing

Role playing is unprepared, unrehearsed dramatization. Role play is form of acting in which the general role of the players is defined but they do not have scripts to follow. This situations are played can be short term or long term.

Role play refers to group of techniques in which participant are ask to accept a different identify   to try to think their way into some else situation and perhaps into their mind as well.

One might assume Role playing to be ´´ acting´´ on a stage with script. However that is practically correct it is also wrong, for the most part. Role playing indeed is a form of acting. Though it doesn’t take place on any sort of stage and there are no script used.  In role playing there are multiple people, each controlling their own character and acting as a characters.  Typically one person will create a storyline of sort to follow and they all will play out that set storyline adding their own twists and turn along the way. These character courses have personality, history, and role in the story. The easiest way to describe Role playing is as work in progress book that is written together by many people.

Purpose of Role play.

•           Engage student actively in learning, so that they appreciate the value of participation, rather than just hoping to learn by absorption.

•           Help students to understand the feeling and attitudes of others by experiencing situations rather than just hearing or reading about them.

•           Provide students with opportunities to develop a range of communication and social interaction skill such as listening, speaking act while they interact with others.

•           Develop students self confident, self esteem and self images.

•           Encourage students to take deep approach to learning.

•           Help student to explore their values and appreciate the consequences of their values based actions.

•           Help students resolve conflicts that have arisen in the classroom or that they may have encountered elsewhere.

•           Give students practice at taking action on their own behalf and on behalf of others in real world situations.

Principles of instructional role play.

1.         Acceptance of student’s responses

The teacher shall accept all responses in a no-evaluation manner. For example, a student should have spirit to play the role of father and mother.

2.         Research and exploration.

This helps students to explore several of problem situations and compare alternatives views. It helps students to solve the problems.

3.         Feedback.

The teacher shall promote the students awareness of their own views and feelings by reflecting, summarizing and paraphrasing their responses.

4.         Explanation of role play

The teacher shall explain the concept of role play and emphasize that there are different ways to play a role alternative way to resolve a problem.

 Procedural- step in enacting a role play(1).

1.         A situation for role- play.

To begin with, choose a situation for a role play, keeping in mind students need‘s to and interest. Teacher should select role play that will give the student an opportunity to practice what they have learned. At the same time, we need a role play that interests the students. They might either suggest themselves that intrigue them or select a topic from a list of given situations.

2.         Role plays design.

After choosing a context for a role play, the next step is to come up with ideas on how this situation may develop. Student‘s level of language proficiency should be taken into consideration. If you feel that your role play requires more profound linguistic competence than the students possess, it would probably be better to simplify it or leave until appropriate. One low intermediate and more advanced levels, role play with the problem or conflict in them work very well because they motivate the characters to talk and to build  in these problem let the standard script to go wrong. This will generate tension and make the role play more interesting.

3.         Linguistic preparation.

Once you have selected suitable role play, predict the language needed for it. At the same beginning level, the language needed is almost completely predictable. The higher the level of students the more difficult it is to prefigure acutely what language students will need, but some prediction is possible.

For example;

The situation of role play is returning item of clothing black to the stone. The teacher asked question, such as, in this situation what will you say to salesperson? And write what the students dictate on the right side of the board. when this is done on the left side of the board the instructor write down useful expression, asking the students, can the customer say it in another way?, what else can the sale person say? This way of introducing new vocabulary makes the students more confident acting out a role play. 

4.         Factual preparation

 This step providing the students with concrete information and clear role description so that they could play their roles with confidence.

For example

In the situation at a rail way station, the person giving the information should have relevant information; the times and destination of the trains, prices of tickets etc. in a more advance class and in a more elaborated situation include on a cue card a fiction name, statues, age personality, and fictitious interest and desires.

    

5.         Assigning the roles

Some instructors ask for volunteer to act out a role play in front of the class though I might a good idea to plan in advance what roles to assign to which students. At the beginning level the teacher can take one of the roles and act it as a model. Sometimes, the student has role play exercises for the home task.

6.         Follow- up

Once the role play is finished, spend some time on debriefing. This does not mean pointing out and correct the mistakes. After the role play, the students are satisfied with themselves; they can feel that they have used their knowledge of the language for something concrete and useful. This feeling of satisfaction will disappear if every mistake is analyzed. Every student should ask their opinion about the role play and welcoming their comment.

Procedural- steps in enacting a role play. (2)

1.         Warm up the group

Have to form a group of students and needs to choose a situation for a role play, in which situation they are going to play and also how they are going to play. Have to make the role play very interesting to the students and in order to make interesting better to let them to choose the situation themselves. If the teacher choose roles and situation for the students then they may not be act and play the role in an effectively.

2.         Select participants.

It has to select the participants for the role play individually about what role they want to take. For instance if we play a role in situation of family then, have to select who wants to take a role of father, mother, brother, sister and etc…

3.         Set the stage

Stage needs to be prepared unlike usual ones. Moreover what need to prepare is how the individual roles are going to act and speak according to the particular role that they are taking. And also prepare what types of dressings they are going to wear which is suitable for the particular roles.

4.         Prepare the observer.

When the role is going to play there also need to have some public watching the play. And also need to have observer or judge to observe and note down how far the role players can acted and speak accordingly and also what mistakes that they are committing because they need to improve next time.

5.         Enact

Here it is playing a role in reality according to the particular roles that the individuals took.

6.         Discuss and evaluate

Mainly discussed about the positive and negative feedback’s but mainly focused about the negatives which are evaluate by the observer while they were acting a role play. Have to really prepare against the mistakes, that they made and develop the next enactment perfectly.

7.         Re-enact

After making perfections against the mistakes that they made, again they are going to enact the role- play.

8.         Share experience and generalize

Needs to share about what good experience that they gained after acting such a role-play. Good experiences like working in team/groups, cooperation with friends, confidence and etc… also need to convey the message to the public that, what moral they are conveying.

Advantages of role play.

•           Provide opportunity for student to assume the role of others.

•           Provides opportunity to practice skill.

•           It enhances communication.

•           It demonstrates how people interact.

•           It improves interpersonal skills.

•           It helps to identify emotions in others.

•           It helps individuals to learn to accept both their own feelings and those of others.

•           It develops confidence and self-efficacy.

Disadvantages.

•           Insufficient information leads to inappropriate results.

•           Aggressive students try to take over.

•           Is time consuming.

•           If not manage well criticism and negative evaluation may occur.

•           Proficient oral skill is necessary.

•           Difficulty for shy person.

•           The lack of space and the large number of students can make the organization of the activities difficult.