- Contentious and thought-provoking article from the Journal of Museum Education.
- A collection of articles about museums and schools, written with museum educators in mind.
Milwaukee Museum of Art website on school tours. See in particular the Museum Manners video, the letter for school principals, and the Chaperone Responsibilities.
- An excellent model for resources that museums might offer, and useful for teachers who are visiting almost any art museum.
Tips for teachers from Scholastic Bloggers Alycia Zimmerman, Brent Vasicek, and Meghan Everette
- Intended for a teacher audience; also useful for museum educators who want a teacher perspective on field trips.
Keri Smith, How to Be an Explorer of the World, NY: Perigree Books, 2001.
- not strictly related to field trips to museums, or to school groups, but a nice model for independent, open-ended exploration.
- While not directly addressing visits to museums, these two reports from The Wallace Foundation are useful resources. “The Qualities of Quality” provides an excellent model for examining what matters and how to achieve it. “Something to Say” shares interviews with low-income tweens and their families, and includes principles for effective programming.
- Thank you Rachel Ropeik for reminding me to add recent research into the value of field trips. “The Educational Value of Field Trips” outlines research done at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, investigating the impact of field trips on critical thinking, historical empathy, factual information, interest in museums, and tolerance. One caveat: the study does not talk about Crystal Bridges’ implementation of tours. This study does NOT show that ALL museum trips achieve all or even one of these outcomes. Perhaps someone from Crystal Bridges would like to guest blog about their field trip goals and model?
Bibliography – Field Trips and Critical Thinking
- This bibliography was created for a previous project I worked on. The Crystal Bridges work is one of the studies mentioned, but there are others.
- Findings from a 2013 convening of “policy experts, practitioners, funders, education innovators, reformers, student activists and others shaping
the conversation about U.S. education.” Essays by various participants propose ways that museums are or could be essential to education. The publication also contains a great list of recent relevant publications.
If you have additional resources to share, please let me know and I will add them to this list.
Museum Questions 
I imagine you may already have these, but there are recent studies on museum field trips from Crystal Bridges (http://educationnext.org/the-educational-value-of-field-trips) and the Smithsonian (Jeff Meade was in on the project and has a shareable copy of the final report) that might help inform this interesting issue.
Here’s a summary of what we know about student learning in museums: http://musdigi.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/student-learning-in-museums-what-do-we-know/
Lynda – this is fantastic. Would you be willing to allow me to post some of this as its own post on Museum Questions, as part of this exploration of Schools and Museums? Credited to you, of course!