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You can use these ideas in any program, regardless of the topic or destination. I hope they are helpful! If you have suggestions or feedback, I’d love to hear from you—send me a message on LinkedIn.

• Alex

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🗣️ Challenge students to define their own “Travel Habit“ to pursue on the trip.

I introduce this concept during our pre-departure meeting so students have time to reflect and prepare. Here’s the text I use for the assignment (posted as a Discussion on Canvas):

One of the best ways to deepen your travel experience? Build a travel habit—something you do on every trip. The habit becomes a thread connecting your adventures and a fun way to compare places.

Here are a few travel habits my husband and I have:

• Read a book by a local author before we go—it gives us rich context, and we often stumble on places from the book during our trip.
• Visit a local grocery store or market—lets us see how everyday life varies from place to place. Also, a good way to discover new candy!
• Get a haircut—it pushes us to learn a few key phrases in the local language and interact with locals.
• Try a local art or craft—like batik in Northern Vietnam or mosaics in Italy. In Greece, we found some ceramics we loved, looked up the artist, and discovered he offered one-on-one pottery lessons. It turned out to be one of our best travel memories!

What travel habit will you try in The Netherlands? Think broadly - one past student chose thrifting! Comment below and get inspired by others’ ideas!

📆 Assign Leaders of the Day.

This serves two purposes:

1. provides students with experience in peer leadership and travel planning
2. gives you, the instructor, additional support during the trip

Before the trip, I pair students and assign them a day. Their mission: make that day the best possible experience for the group. They’re responsible for reviewing the itinerary in depth, researching the people or organizations we’ll meet, and suggesting meal or free-time ideas. They prepare slides in advance, then tweak and send them out the night before their assigned day.

If we’re visiting a company, they kick off the Q&A. If something unexpected comes up, they’re the first to step up. I've seen this structure be incredibly valuable—students grow as leaders and travelers, and they’ve saved the day more than once when things didn’t go as planned!

🔢 Make a collaborative spreadsheet with key facts and figures.

Students encounter lots of facts and figures during travel. To help them absorb and contextualize these learnings, I create a shared Google Sheet where each student must contribute two entries:

• One figure related to the destination country
• One comparable figure from their own context (e.g., their hometown, home country, or another relevant example)

For example, after learning that 1,835 people died in the 1953 Dutch flood that led to the Delta Works, students might compare that to the 8,000+ deaths in the 1900 Galveston Flood that prompted the building of the seawall.

Here’s an example spreadsheet.