Escaping to Education
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” – Mark Twain
You can’t deny it was one of the most exciting days in the entire year.
You heard the telltale rumble of the diesel engine and the high-pitched squeal of the brakes echo through the early morning cold as a streak of yellow and blinking red lights flashed by the front windows of your home.
Most likely you had dressed in your coolest outfit that morning; and as you caught a quick hug from your parents and grabbed your backpack off the front steps, you made absolutely sure not to forget one, crucial piece of paper precipitously lying on the edge of the kitchen counter:
The permission slip. Signed.
Field trips are one of the most magical experiences school children can have. They get to leave school, escape the confines of their familiar and comfortable classrooms. All five senses are on high alert as they walk right back out the school’s front door they just entered, chatting non-stop as they pick who they’re going to sit next to on the bus. They’re playing hooky: but endorsed hooky; they have a signed permission slip that says their parents are okay with them playing hooky. Then, oftentimes unexpectedly (because, in case you’ve forgotten, a conversation between 6th graders can be quite engrossing), they arrive at a destination that brings to life the year’s textbooks and workbooks.
It’s an exciting, immense responsibility that destination managers and designers do not take lightly. We’re in the business of inspiration. The right lesson, delivered to the right student, at the right time, in the right environment, can lead to a lifelong passion that, as famed scientist Bill Nye the Science Guy delights in saying, “could change the world!”
But much has changed since our youth of being herded around echoing museum halls by our chaperones like a flock of lost ducklings. Although most programs have only been developed within the last few decades, destinations of all shapes and sizes across the country are innovating their school programs in exciting and new ways every day.
So match up with your buddy, get in a single file line, and do not pull off your name tag: we’re going on a trip to learn about some of the nation’s most innovative and exciting school programs.
Key Lessons
The destinations interviewed in this issue of Destinology all presented a wide variety of challenges and the innovative programs, staff, and solutions they harness to tackle them. While one might think the operations of a steadfast military encampment couldn’t share anything with a beautiful botanical garden bursting with blossoms, they’re a lot more similar when you get down into the weeds. All nine destinations agreed on three, powerful best practices:
1. Every destination has celebrity power to leverage
It’s true: we can’t all have James Cameron swooping in to talk about his Deepsea Challenger submarine, but each interviewee stressed that every destination has celebrities, and guests love them. It can be a resource-efficient, and often-times more effective approach, to bring these celebrities live and in the flesh to visitors, rather than developing complex programming or interpretive displays about their exploits. Guests love to meet the heroes behind the stories, and those interactions help the lessons stick.
2. Hands-on activities are essential for inspiration and cementing the lesson
It comes as no surprise that destination managers agree that the more senses you can engage in the lesson, the better the guests will remember it. Far gone are the days of simple lectures, demonstrations, tours, and walls of text: you have to get visitors’ hands dirty. That’s why every student to the Botanical Garden pots their own plant: to smell the rich soil and feel the rigid stems. That’s why all guests to the Inside the Economy Museum leave with a bag of shredded money: to feel the physical fuel of America and remember its importance. Field trippers at Fort Ticonderoga live it all: they sleep in the barracks, they eat similar meals, put on uniform components: it’s all part of making the lessons memorable for a lifetime. Identifying key subjects to teach is the foundation, but the most successful educators will find a variety of ways to teach the same subject to cement it in students’ minds.
3. Educational programming and environments need to constantly evolve
It can be painful to go to your interpretive staff, look them in the eyes, and tell them, “All the programming you developed over the last year has all been great. Now it’s time to scrap it all, and start fresh.” But it’s the nature of any successful business: the industry, the market, and guests are always evolving, and so must you to survive. Guests’ topical interests are always changing, state testing standards are evolving, new educational tools are being developed (remember Smart Boards, and could you imagine iPads a decade ago?), how we learn is evolving, and even the technologies our destinations celebrate – like Caterpillar or Sony – are advancing by the day. It’s a tireless process, but an immensely rewarding one: we must continue to innovate our programming to remain at the forefront as educators.
The Power of Brand
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – Augustine of Hippo
With the global reach of the iconic yellow rectangle, visiting school groups to the National Geographic Museum at the National Geographic Society’s Washington D.C. headquarters have come face-to-face with full scale models of all three of NASA’s Mars rovers, the recently rediscovered Spinosaurus, or any of National Geographic’s hundreds of real-world Explorers. As part of National Geographic Live’s programming, these globe-trotting adventurers return often to headquarters to present to school groups about their work, recently welcoming Kobie Boykins, one of the Curiosity rover’s key system designers, or Dr. Robert Ballard, ocean explorer and locator of The Titanic. National Geographic Live also delivers beautiful, “gymnasium-sized” maps that can help teach classrooms a variety of subjects.
The Henry Ford began as an educational institution when it opened in 1933 as the Edison Institute. Education is still at the core of the institution’s work in many forms, most significantly with the presence of the Henry Ford Academy. “A public school in a public space,” the Academy maintains a unique partnership with the Wayne County Public School System and Ford Motor Company. The Henry Ford also welcomes over 200,000 school visitors every year, who learn first-hand about the American spirit of innovation, ingenuity, and resourcefulness through the destination’s five sites. “No other city felt the 2008 recession like Detroit,” adds chief learning officer Paula Gangopadhyay. “We realigned our vision to meet the needs of the day. Innovation, the engine of the economy, is at its core of our institution and is infused into countless programs.” One of those programs is the new weekly show on CBS “Innovation Nation,” connecting our past
innovations to today’s leading innovators.
Situated in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, the Sony Wonder Technology Lab is operated and fully-funded by Sony Corporation of America, the U.S. subsidiary of Sony Corporation. “The Lab is a dynamic interactive museum that introduces people of all ages to the many aspects of science and technology through a rich, educational hands-on experience,” states Karen Kelso, Executive Director of the Sony Wonder Technology Lab. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) is infused into every aspect of the Lab’s programming and its programs are designed to support current New York Department of Education science and technology curriculums. The Lab also hosts the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition showcase, where local high school students present their award-winning robotic creations.
Neighboring the world headquarters, the Caterpillar Visitors Center enjoys unmatched access to some of the globe’s leading scientists and engineers. In addition to the visiting talent that presents on-site as well as helps develop its educational materials, the Visitor Center boasts six working construction vehicles, including the 336E H Hybrid Excavator, and the six associated simulators that train their operators, all of which school groups can hop inside and explore. Much of the curriculum focuses on the development and education of Caterpillar’s variety of STEM-focused fields, even including the company’s job board at the end of a field trip. More than a 1,000 job titles are displayed, and students frequently ask to apply for any open positions at the Visitor Center.
Inspiring Passion for Conservation
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” – Nelson Mandela
SeaWorld
is wholly unique: it’s part zoo, part aquarium, and part theme park. That means that if your child is one of the hundreds of thousands that visit the three parks each year, their experience could be entirely different than the next field trip. Kids might spend the day studying and riding some of the world’s most renowned roller coasters, learning complex physics principles. A field trip might hop between exhibits learning about adaptation, conservation, and animal behavior. Or classrooms might welcome one of the thousands of annual outreach presentations that SeaWorld conducts across the country, learning from live Animal Ambassadors including penguins, alligators, lemurs, eagles, and more.
“Educating people about marine life was the core goal when founding SeaWorld in 1964,” says SeaWorld’s corporate curator of conservation and education Bill Street. “It’s our job to share our passion and knowledge about animals, every day. We strive to help guests and students understand that their everyday actions impact the environment, teach them the effects of those actions, and inspire them to help protect our world.”
SeaWorld’s more than 200 education staff come from a variety of different backgrounds, “as diverse as our visitors,” says Street. Most staff have bachelor’s or master’s degrees in either science or education, and have been pooled from across the globe. Some grew up in SeaWorld’s summer camp program, became counselors, and now work there full time; while others were school teachers fresh out of college, but quickly moved to SeaWorld for the freedom and opportunities that experiential education presents.
The Parks’ educators leverage the ADDIE system to develop their variety of programs, working through the five phases of Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. “All the programs are designed to complement what’s being taught in the classroom and to align with state standards and national benchmarks for science literacy,” says Street. “The phenomenal benefit we have with three destinations is that, in practice, we have three different “laboratories” in three different regions of the country. So when one park discovers certain strengths of a new workshop or presentation, they share it with the other two parks to improve the programs at all three.”
State and national education standards are always evolving, and students’ priorities and learning styles are growing and changing rapidly by generation. As part of the greater community of all zoos and aquariums, SeaWorld has the immense responsibility to inspire their visiting students with passion about conservation and wildlife. “I’m incredibly optimistic about our youth today,” says Street. “They’re so passionate about wildlife and they have an inspiring ability to find causes and issues in the wild that they care about, organize a group of like-minded individuals, and accomplish things we could never have dreamed of when we were their age. It’s amazing to be a part of that equation.”
The Greatest Lesson is Your Destination
When Busch Stadium opened in 2006, manager of stadium tours Brian Finch took a look across the nation at the most recent wave of ballpark openings. “Brand new ballparks of course had a really high spike of visitation in their first year, but then most trickled off afterwards,” said Finch. “But what was really compelling were ballparks that did anything in the way of educational offerings had a 30% higher attendance retention rate over those that did nothing in year two.” Finch then launched the Cardinals Academic Program (CAP), a 90-minute tour program that covers three pre-selected school subjects for visiting classes, including language arts, science, history, and more. Many of these subjects are taught virtually through pre-recorded interviews with the Cardinals Nation, from announcers, to trainers, to athletes. “Every destination has celebrities it can leverage,” says Finch. The program is currently being evaluated to incorporate the newly-opened Cardinals Hall of Fame and Museum.
Fort Ticonderoga serves as the majestic centerpiece of a region full of epic stories that have defined North America. With the country’s victory in WWII, national pride swelled and the Atomic Family hit the road to visit America’s historic icons. Ticonderoga’s educational programming hasn’t stopped ramping up to meet groups’ evolving expectations since. Although it’s based in the scenic setting of the rural Adirondacks, Fort Ticonderoga’s school group visitation has increased 25% over 2013, pulling mostly from upstate New York and Vermont, in large part due to new, innovative programming. One of its most immersive programs, “To Act as One Body,” enlists field trips as new recruits in 1775, putting them through a whole day of military exercises including forming up in a mess, solider training, fatigue duties, drilling, and a noon-day meal. In 2013, Ticonderoga piloted a highly successful overnight Destination Education experience, where school groups travel from out of state to spend the night in the barracks to learn about life inside Fort Ticonderoga and the conflicts outside its walls.
The Missouri Botanical Garden is one of the oldest, largest and most prestigious centers for plant research in the United States. The Garden promotes a number of themes in its workshops for students: ecology, local biodiversity, and the relationships between plants and animals. At the core of their programming is a three-session visit. An educator first starts by visiting a classroom and delivers a hands-on workshop about the particular unit. Shortly thereafter, students visit the Garden to engage in a guided photography tour, locating particular plants and components of the lesson. After their visit, the educator returns to the classroom with a slideshow of the children’s photos that best exemplify the unit, and also guides students through their own potted planting. This three-pronged approach helps cement the unit’s lessons in the students’ memories by engaging a number of different learning styles around one subject over time.
Zoo Museum District
St. Louis might just be the nation’s best city for field trips. More than 40 years ago, the citizens of the City and County of St. Louis, Missouri unanimously voted to create the Metropolitan Zoological Park and Museum District. As the nation’s first and most successful regional cultural district, collected taxes enable entirely free admission at five of the nation’s best-in-class destinations, all of which encircle scenic Forest Park:
The Saint Louis Zoo, Art Museum, Science Center, The Missouri History Museum, and The Missouri Botanical Garden.
It didn’t take long at all for St. Louis Public School District Superintendent Dr. Kelvin Adams to recognize the immense value of this initiative when he assumed the title in 2008. Among many other innovative programs, Dr. Adams initiated a required field trip initiative for St. Louis students in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade, ensuring all students visited each of the five institutions, plus The Magic House (St. Louis’s children’s museum), by the time they enter middle school. Each destination tailors its program appropriately for the visiting grade level: pre-K visits the Magic House; kindergartners and first graders study botany at the Garden; second graders learn about biology at the Zoo; third graders explore STEM at the Science Center; fourth graders learn about regional history at the History Museum; and fifth graders study art history and technique at the Art Museum. Dr. Adams, his team, and the partnering destinations all recognize the importance of cultural experiences in the academic lives of students, and many of the individual schools launched programs to help underwrite the remaining costs of field trip transportation.
While these six destinations have banded together to help better the educational experiences of the city’s students, there are still numerous additional field trip destinations throughout the region. St. Louis is home to the Fabulous Fox Theater, Museum of Transportation, Powell Symphony Hall, the World Bird Sanctuary, Endangered Wolf Center, the Old Courthouse, and of course the iconic Gateway Arch. But the city doesn’t stop there; it continues to develop new educational institutions seemingly every year. Spring 2014 welcomed the new Cardinals Hall of Fame and Museum, while the Inside the Economy Museum, another free St. Louis museum, just opened this fall. As economics are typically not a mandatory high school subject, the museum provides a fantastic, easy access supplement to classroom lessons, and teaches students about their individual role in, and impact on, the economy. “And yes,” cites Economy Museum director Tom Shepherd, “each student leaves with a bag of real shredded money.”
St. Louis is a model program and region for the powerful effect strategic partnerships between destinations can have on the growing, curious, creative minds of its students.
