In October 2024, many students from Years 9 to 13 (ages 13-16) at The British School travelled to Iceland for a Geography trip of a lifetime! Over five days, the students walked behind waterfalls, explored lava tunnels, scrambled on glaciers, felt the awesome power of the Atlantic in winter, were warmed by molten lava, plunged into geothermal waters, and were awestruck by the aurora borealis.
A Truly Remarkable Destination
For seeing and experiencing the awe and wonder of physical geography, there are few places that can top Iceland as a destination. Formed from volcanic activity over the last 20 million years and standing alone in the cold North Atlantic, the combination of fire and ice results in extraordinary features that are rarely seen together. Over a single day during the trip, students were walking with crampons and ice axes on a glacier in the morning while in the afternoon they were exploring a lava tunnel. Later the same day, they swam in a geothermally heated swimming pool and then they were able to experience the wonder of the Northern Lights.
The Educational Aims of the Trip
In the Netherlands, where the land is densely populated and controlled, students rarely experience first-hand the power of nature. The main aim of the trip is to give that first-hand experience of the physical geography that is typically otherwise limited to the textbook or videos. You can read about glaciers and watch them on films, but there’s no substitute for standing on one, feeling its power and also seeing its fragility.
Exercising High Performance Learning Skills and Behaviours
(High Performance Learning explainer at end of blog)
The trip absolutely sparked students’ Curiosity (VAA). The world is not as simple in reality as often presented in a textbook and seeing how things work in the real-world naturally encouraged lots of questions about how features worked in the real world. This was also a great trip for Connection Finding (ACP), both connecting to class room learning and seeing if textbook explanations matched or differed in reality but also making connections between different geographical features, e.g. how volcanic activity under an icecap can create black sand beaches.
Students Demonstrate Impressive Resilience and Self-reliance
The students were brilliant and threw themselves into the activities. There was little time to take in one activity before they were exposed to another! They were impressively self-reliant and coped very well given that we moved hotel every night and were constantly on and off buses. It was a great opportunity for different year groups from the school to mix and was nice to see how well our students worked together in such a new environment.
The (literal) Highlight of the Trip
The whole experience was wonderful but the Northern Lights stood out as a special highlight for me, because I have never seen them before. The student engagement was fantastic throughout the trip, which is always rewarding to see as a teacher. I do remember a Year 10 student at one point just turning to his friend and saying “How come Iceland is so wonderful?”
Another student remarked:
“This was an absolutely brilliant experience to feel and learn about Iceland. This is especially helpful if you are studying geography as well. This allows you to actually see a lot of the features that you wouldn’t normally be able to find elsewhere. This was incredible and we were lucky this year to see the Northern Lights.”
A Familiar and Formative Experience
This is the first time we have taken a Geography trip to Iceland but it is familiar to me because I have taken trips with other schools in the past and, indeed, even went when I was at school, way back in the 1990s. That trip had a formative effect on me and was part of the reason I went to study Geology at university. We hope our own BSN trip was similarly impactful for our students.
The Value of Educational Trips
Educational trips are great opportunities for both learning and personal growth. In Geography, we really value fieldwork for helping students to make sense of the world around them. Trips like this, when students have to manage themselves away from their parents, really help them to become more independent and grow in confidence.
What is High Performance Learning (HPL)?
The BSN practises HPL, a research-based, educational philosophy that believes everyone is capable of being a high performer when they are explicitly taught the necessary skills, behaviours and mindset required for top learning potential. A set of Specific ‘Values, Attitudes and Attributes’ (VVAs) and ‘Advanced Cognitive Performance’ characteristics (ACP) explicitly teach strategies for how to behave and how to think and therefore how to learn.
Duncan King is Deputy Head and currently Acting Head of Senior School Leidschenveen at The British School in the Netherlands. Before joining the BSN, Duncan worked for 16 years in leading independent schools in the UK in different leadership roles including Deputy Head (Academic), Director of Digital Learning and Head of Geography.
