Using Visual Mind Mapping to Plan Classroom Field Trips

Field trips are an enjoyable and fun part of the student classroom experience. However, planning a field trip is often not as fun, or enjoyable, as the trip itself. Teachers, when planning an outing, must organize everything from deciding when and where to go, to collecting permission slips from parents or guardians. All of this planning can leave the teacher wondering how to organize the trip without forgetting any of the necessary steps. Visual Mind Mapping can be instrumental in helping teachers to organize this information by allowing them to “map out” all of the components of the trip in a creative and intuitive format. With a Mind Map, the teacher can plan the entire trip, start to finish, in one, highly visual, and spatially represented format. The teacher can, thus, use Visual Mind Mapping to make the process of planning and executing a class field trip more effortless than originally imagined.

What are Visual Mind Maps and How Are They Created?

A Visual Mind Map is “a means of organizing information that allows individuals to create diagrams, pictures, and other graphic visuals in order to show the relationship between ideas or other types of information”.¹ With a Visual Mind Map, the creator makes use of colors and symbols to construct the map and represent his or her ideas in a non-linear format. When creating a Visual Mind Map, the individual usually begins by showing the key concept or main idea of the information as a central image, located in the center of the map. Any themes surrounding the main idea are shown on “branches” that are attached to the central image. Subsequent themes of less importance are then attached to these branches using “child branches”, and so on. The resulting diagram is a “map” of the ideas and information presented that includes the images, visual graphics, and colors the individual associates with each of the themes and ideas.

Planning a Class Field Trip Using a Visual Mind Map

A fourth grade teacher wants to begin planning her annual class field trip. Remembering how difficult it was to keep track of everything last year, she decides to make this year’s process simpler by using a Visual Mind Map. She begins constructing her map by placing a visual to represent the class field trip in the center of the map. Next, she lists all of the main aspects necessary for planning the trip, such as scheduling the trip with the museum the class will visit, on “branches” attached to the central topic. She lastly lists all of the steps she will need to take to successfully execute each aspect on “child branches” attached to the “branches”. Throughout the map, the teacher places interesting pictures and visuals to make her map more intuitive and the steps easier to remember. When she has finished her Visual Mind Map, it might look similar to the attached Map diagram.

Organizing the Trip from the Mind Map

As the teacher begins to execute the steps listed in her Visual Mind Map, she is amazed at how smoothly the process of organizing the trip is going as compared to last year. The teacher is not bogged down with “to-do” lists that she must find, as was the case previously. Rather, everything that the teacher needs to remember when organizing the trip, including contact information for the museum’s field trip department and deadlines for collecting permission slips, is neatly “mapped out” in one, concise document. In addition, the teacher’s use of visual imagery and associative colors make remembering the steps for planning the trip much easier. The teacher, therefore, finds that she is able to organize the trip much more efficiently this year, finishing well ahead of when she did last year. Visual Mind Mapping has, therefore, made the process of planning and organizing the field trip almost as enjoyable for the teacher as the trip itself.

1. Farrand, Paul; Hussain, Fearzana and Hennessy, Enid (May 2002). “The efficacy of the ‘mind map’ study technique”. Medical Education 36 (5): 426–431.

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