A class of college sophomores preparing to enter the education field were asked who had been their favorite teacher and why. Every student could immediately name a teacher and explain how that teacher had made learning come alive. It wasn’t the personality of the teacher that was most important; it was the extra lengths to which the teacher went to make learning meaningful and relevant to students’ lives. And maybe even more importantly, the students really learned a lot from those teachers.

Live event learning (LEL) is a pedagogical approach that can make learning come alive for your students and support real and lasting learning. A few examples:

• In a fourth-grade reading class the teacher blindfolds all the students and puts them through a series of activities in order for the students to comprehend the circumstances of a story’s main character who becomes blind.
• When learning about the Civil War, a fifth-grade class visits a cemetery to see the gravestone of a Civil War veteran and then interviews a living descendant.
• When studying forces of flight, a seventh-grade class compares the wing shapes and spans of airplanes at the local airport.

LEL is the intentional teaching process of bringing in a live experience that is related to the content or skill being taught. LEL can happen outside the school on field trips, inside the classroom in dramatic role playing, or at home as part of recommended parent/child activities. LEL brings a sense of immediacy to learning, stirring real emotions, causing authentic reactions, and creating personal relevance.

Maximize Your Favorite Field Trips

You may already have on your schedule some favorite places to which you take your students each year—the fire station, the zoo, or the nature center. With planning, these regular events can become powerful cross-curricular learning experiences. For instance, if you were taking your class to the local cemetery, you could add/subtract ages of the deceased, create timelines, research causes of death, analyze ethnic backgrounds, interpret headstone epitaphs, make up stories, or identify geometric shapes on monuments. Have the students imagine and write out biographies or news stories using the names and time periods. Can you find actual family histories for people in the cemetery in the local library?

Or maybe you are going on the annual field trip to the fire station; students could learn how fire fighting has changed over the years, or how fire fighters use maps to get to fires quickly. They could also research what causes most house fires or what types of materials are most flammable. Instruct the students to learn as much as they can to come up with a family fire prevention plan. After the trip, students can read first-hand accounts of fire fighter experiences and write thank-you letters to their local fire fighters.

Think about activities you could do before, during, and after the trip. Also, think about cross-curricular connections that could be made. Here’s a list of questions to think about that can help you plan a memorable learning event:

• Where are you going? What background knowledge would make the trip more meaningful?
• What could you read about? What types of things will you see that start with a certain letter or that rhyme with certain words? What are some vocabulary words that would be important to know when you go? What novels or stories have been written in relation to this place? What nonfiction articles would provide background information? What could you write about? Could you write a poem about the experience?
• What math connections can be made? What could be measured, counted, estimated, or compared? Will there be geometric shapes where you are going? How much time will it take? How far is it? How much will it cost?
• What science connections can be made? Will you be traveling to or through different ecosystems? What particular animal and plant life will you encounter? How might the weather affect your trip? What data could you collect? Will there be signs of erosion? Will rock formations be visible? What technology will you notice?
• What are some social studies connections that can be made? Will you use a map to get there or to navigate once you are there? Will you notice any artifacts? What cultural images will you see? Will you see any evidence of change over time? What products and services will you encounter? What laws will be followed? Will you notice any political signs or bumper stickers? What religious symbols or buildings will you notice? Where do people live and why? What landmarks will you see?

Come Up with New Field Trip Ideas

Perhaps you want to develop some new field trip ideas to match some important learning objectives. Or maybe you just are tired of the same old field trips and want to come up with new, fresh ideas. One way to do this is to make a list of the topics you want to address and then brainstorm an event or events that could make the learning more meaningful. For example, a science teacher wanting students to better understand the effects of seasonal and weather changes on plants, animals, and people might come up with a field trip to a place nearby that has slightly different weather because of a geographic feature (for example, near a lake, inside a forest, near a tall building, a shaded place) or might choose to visit a local nature center several times a year to observe differences. Remember to use the previous list of questions to maximize these new events, too.

When you are brainstorming events for learning objectives, ask yourself questions like these:

• What would be the most logical event that would match this objective?
• What places could we go to, or whom could we visit right here at school?
• What might be an unusual but interesting place to go?

Types of Live Events

To do LEL, you don’t have to be leaving your classroom or school constantly, nor must you have a huge field trip budget. There are many types of live events, many of which can happen inside your classroom and on a small budget. Here are a few ideas:

Conduct scavenger hunts in or around your school or community. Search for things that start with certain letters or that rhyme with certain words. Search for weather-related things. Search for things associated with government or with goods/services. Check off numbers that you see that are larger than 100 or less than 1000. Look for animals or plants.

In demonstrations, students build something, create something, or model something. They are opportunities for students not only to show what they know but also to experience first-hand how things really work, how things can go wrong, how things can be improved, and how much fun learning can be. Some teachers have students build and shoot off rockets, make volcanoes that erupt, build a small engine that works, or build a model city.

In virtual expeditions, teachers take their students to a place on the internet. Sometimes they can go to specific websites that are built specifically for virtual field trips. Examples include these:

• Educational Web Adventures—www.eduweb.com/portfolio/adventure.php
• Virtual Field Trips—www.uen.org/utahlink/tours/fieldtrips2.htm
• Museum Field Trips—www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr057.shtml

Another option is to create your own virtual field trip. Every year Neil Erdmann’s third-grade class in suburban Minneapolis undertakes a 3-month virtual bike trip across the United States. Every other year, the class goes on a virtual kayak trip through the Great Lakes. They plan the route, budget, pack, investigate historical sites along the way, and document their journey on a website. They read about the sites; write about their journey;“experience” the weather, geology, and ecosystems of the places visited; and gain historical perspectives and a greater geographic understanding of the places and people they virtually visit.

Simulations provide opportunities for students to experience what it would be like to be in another’s shoes or experience something through role playing that would be difficult to experience first-hand. As previously mentioned, blindfolding students to experience what it would be like to be blind like a character in a book would be one example. Another example might be to have the students role play a city council meeting and debate what to do about the pollution problem in the city.

Teachable moments can result from major events like September 11th or last year’s tsunami, or from everyday happenings such as a loose tooth. In other words, teachable moments happen all the time in the national and local news and also in day-to-day student life. No matter what you are teaching, you can usually make a connection to a current event by simply asking the students questions like,“What is going on in the news or in your life that relates to what we are talking about?” Or, “How is this (skill or content) in the day-to-day lives of people or in things that are happening in the news?” Morning meetings in which students share what is happening in their daily lives can be one good source for teachable moments.

In community service projects students are involved in solving a real problem or providing a real service to an individual, a segment of the community, or a community cause. One teacher had young students collect pennies to give to a community charity. The students learned estimation skills and practiced computational skills within a meaningful experience.

Almost any subject or topic can come alive through a reader’s theater production. Reader’s theater is minimal theater in support of literature, reading, or other classroom topics. One teacher has the students play raindrops going through the rain cycle. You can find scripts that have already been written, or you can have your students write the plays themselves.

Practical Tips for Out-of-School Experiences

Planning is a critical element in the success of any field trip. Even letting the school cooks know well in advance that you will be gone from school, or need lunches, will help. And don’t forget that you need administrative approval for out-of-school experiences. Following are some questions that can be helpful in planning a successful trip:

• What is the main objective of the trip?
• Why is it important that we go? (Utilize the list of learning activities that you have prepared.)
• How much will it cost? Can we afford it? Will we need to ask parents to help financially?
• Will we need chaperones?
• What guidance must we provide the chaperones? Will they be helping with any of the learning activities? If so, what support do they need?
• What preparations are needed to ensure student safety?
• How will the students be transported?
• What supervision modifications are needed?
• Do any students need special assistance or services?
• Who will be able to accompany these children and provide these services if the project is outside of the school-day hours?
• Will the students need meals or snacks?
• What rules are in place for students bringing personal items?
• What discipline procedures are in place once outside of the classroom?
• What emergency communication procedures are in place?
• Has the destination organization been contacted?
• Do I have the names and numbers of those people in charge?
• Do they know why we are coming and what we hope to learn from our visit?
• Do they know when we are coming, how many are in the group, and if any children need special assistance?
• Are they aware of the time allotted for the visit?
• Do we need to bring any materials along like paper and pencils for some of the learning activities?

Your principal will likely require this information before approving the trip. If you have the answers all figured out ahead of time, along with the instructional objectives and goals for meeting the standards set prior to the project development, you are more likely to get approval.

Live event learning is an important teaching strategy that can be used everyday and at different levels to make learning more meaningful, relevant, and memorable for your students. A nice fringe benefit will be that you might be that teacher they talk about when they go on to teachers’ college.

Jerry Berg has taught at the elementary level for 18 years and is enrolled in the Doctor of Education in Leadership program at St. Mary’s University, Winona, MN. He can be reached at jerryberg@mchsi.com. Rod Haenke is a former Catholic-school teacher and has served on the faculties of St. Thomas University and St. Mary’s University in Minnesota. He is founder and director of Instructional Designs, Inc., and can be reached at rhaenke@instructionaldesigns.net.

Discussion Questions

1. What teachers do you remember from your school years? Did they make learning more meaningful?
2. What are your most memorable learning experiences from your school years?
3. What types of live event learning seem most practical?
4. What challenges do you need to overcome to implement more live event learning?
5. Realistically, how much live event learning can take place in one day?
6. How can schools be reorganized to better facilitate live event learning?

Resources

WebQuests: http://webquest.org/ Performance Learning Systems: www.plsweb.com/
International Education and Resource Network: www.iearn.org/
Global Schoolhouse Projects: www.globalschoolnet.org/GSH/index.html
Telecollaborate: nschubert.home.mchsi.com/
E2Quest: www.anoka.k12.mn.us/education/components/scrapbook/ default.php?sectiondetailid=140358