Facilitating Field Trips and Guest Speaker Sessions for Effective Student Learning
By Heather Butler -- Field trips and guest speakers are a wonderful tool for enhancing course content. They expose the students to real-world applications of the course, as well as introducing them to professionals in the field, which in turn creates informal networking opportunities between the students and the presenters ( Ji et al., 2021 ). However, I have learned over the years through many, many field trips and guest speakers that the experience is only as valuable as the preparation invested before the event. As much as I enjoy connecting students with guest speakers and organizing the events, the effectiveness in my earlier years was very hit-or-miss in terms of student responsiveness and the kinds of questions they asked. Some classes were very gregarious and asked the speakers meaningful, in-depth questions, while other classes were quite timid and unresponsive. In the latter situations, I felt badly for the speakers because it appeared my students were not interested in t