LEAP: Learning through Exploration and
Active ParticipationSM
NETC is unique in offering the LEAP Enrichment Program. LEAP brings contemporary teaching strategies, used by excellent teachers in the classroom, to the constantly changing environments encountered while travelling.
The major objectives of LEAP are:
a) To engage students and make them active learners.
b) To challenge students to think critically.
c) To facilitate both personal and intellectual growth.
LEAP is not just a series of activities described in a catalog, it is the entire relationship between each student, the places they encounter, and their NETC Tour Director acting as a cultural mediator.
The academic basis for LEAP is Howard Gardener's theory of multiple intelligences, the philosophy of constructivism and the synthesis of the transmission, transaction, and transformational approaches to learning.
Why is LEAP Important in Educational Travel?
Students learn best when they are engaged, and challenged, and in any group, a wide variety of learning styles and social skills will be represented, each deserving an opportunity to shine. LEAP! was designed specifically to replace the old-fashioned lecturing style of traditional tour guides, with a dynamic, inclusive, and constructivist approach.
LEAP Video Gallery
How is LEAP Delivered on your Educational Tour?
NETC‘s LEAP Trained Tour Directors are cultural mediators who translate and interpret places and events. Their goal is to:
- Raise the students' awareness of cultural differences and similarities
- Help them deal with cross-cultural challenges and celebrate successes
- Prompt and question the students to promote critical thinking
- Challenge students with questions and tasks
- Create relevant context for students in new locales by making connections
- Facilitate the involvement of all types of learners and personalities
- Encourage the students to speculate on outcomes, and discuss and debate issues
- Employ a successful thematic approach
…along with many other excellent educational activities!
What is LEAP Training?
NETC Tour Directors have developed their exceptional leadership and educational skills as a result of extensive LEAP Training, which includes cultivating an understanding of how all students - and all people - learn. Tour Directors are also well trained in handling the many challenges inherent in managing a group of students. In addition to extensive logistical training, our Tour Directors' key skills include the ability to:
- Constructively arrange students into smaller working groups,
- Ask questions and take answers effectively
- Engage all types of learners and include students with different social skills
- Empower the students to take intellectual risks
- Create context and relevance for events, historical landmarks and other tour items
- Present information in a fun and interesting manner
- Involve students in a constructivist manner
- Use themes to make connections to a variety of academic disciplines as well as existing knowledge
- Prompt students to speculate on outcomes and construct their own scenarios for outcomes
- Encourage discussion and debate
The outcome of this unique educational approach is that students...
- Understand the complex trends, political movements, social conditions, and power struggles that led to wars, revolutions, and other important historical events which have shaped the countries they visit rather than simply knowing that they happened, but not necessarily understanding how or why.
- Understand why they are visiting these incredible places and learn about interesting and often surprising connections to their own experience and their own country. Discover connections to their existing knowledge.
- Understand on a much deeper level how and why other cultures are different from our own and also come to appreciate how in many ways they are similar.
- Appreciate their own country’s connection to, and relationship with, other parts of the world and other cultures.
In this way, students learn a great deal about the world, and about themselves. In this way, they learn.
A Few Examples of How a LEAP Trained Tour Director Works with a Student Group
- During a bus journey between destinations, students may form small groups and make up rap songs, write poems about an historical event or a place or person, trying to capture as much relevant and educational information as possible. Each small group then presents their song or poem to the larger group, and the winners earn a prize.
- After spending the day visiting inspiring historical landmarks, students will organize a role-playing game in which they, for example, portray spectators watching a triumph in the Roman Forum, or leaders discussing political and social issues in the prelude to a revolution.
- Structured Tour Director-led debates encourage students to learn about great figures from different places and time periods.
- Scavenger hunts challenge students to scout out specific items, places, or other objectives- tangible or intangible- based on clues they receive from their Tour Director.
- Mock auctions involving lavishly detailed sales pitches set teams competing to sell paintings, chateaux, towns, or even countries to the rest of the group.
- "Think. Pair. Share" is especially successful on buses
- Some tour directors choose one student each day to review the local daily paper and present a summary of the main news. Then another student does the same with an American Newspaper. This creates very interesting discussions.
- Dissecting pizza, designing aqueducts, and constructing cathedrals.
The list is infinitely long - and always growing and becoming more and more creative. You can read about some of these activities in our materials, but the vast majority happen spontaneously on tour, led by the Tour Director. Because of their LEAP training, our Tour Directors' activities are always pedagogically sound and extremely effective. It is our view that the majority of the learning that happens on an NETC Tour is not written in the itinerary at all!
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Students experiencing the culture of Venice, in
"Behind the Carnival Mask" |
LEAP Educational Activities Described in Our Itineraries
NETC tour activities achieve a variety of different objectives. Many of our fun and fascinating projects, such as cooking dinner with professional chefs, learning to dance the flamenco, gladiator school, and bullfighting school, allow students to break out of the tourist bubble and get more intensely involved in a place. Students are empowered and inspired by these types of experiences. Educational, hands-on activities like these also help students to more deeply appreciate the art of the activity that lives at the core of the culture.
Many activities such as debates and role-plays, which encourage critical thinking and deep understanding of issues, are designed to complement sightseeing and are often scheduled in the evenings or on the bus during long drives.
These educational activities are more than just great learning experiences - they are great fun for the students!