Plan

Strategies

After you have planned your itinerary and made arrangements with each institution, the next step involves preparing teachers for the trip. Different strategies you may want to use include:

• If you received pre-visit materials from the various content providers, review them and distribute the items most useful and applicable to your group's needs. Set up a time to review these materials together.
• Schedule a session to introduce the theme for your trip and discuss what you will be seeing ahead of time. Some content providers can participate virtually in these pre-visit sessions via Skype or other methods. Inquire about the possibility of doing this with your group.
• Outline expectations. Require each teacher to return from the trip with materials and experiences that will form the basis of an activity or with ideas to share with other teachers.
• Introduce an activity that focuses teachers on developing a lesson they can use back in the classroom.
• Develop a packing checklist for participants to ensure that they bring comfortable shoes, a light jacket or sweater (meeting rooms can be chilly, even in summer), writing materials, and cameras to gather images for use back in the classroom.
• One week before your visit, provide each institution with a final count on the number of participants and a participant contact list.
• Create a scavenger hunt that leads your teachers to discover sites, objects, and artifacts related to the theme and connects each element of the trip.