Following the Equator

Group Leader Spotlight: Maria and Corey Lumpkin

Maria Lumpkin is the Director of Student Life and Engagement at Spelman College. Her husband, Corey, is the Program Manager of the Public Health Sciences Institute at Morehouse College. Together, they take students all over the world with EF College Study Tours.

Spelman and Morehouse colleges are part of the largest consortium of historically black institutions of higher learning in the world. Corey has taught courses in public health and health-care administration at the collegiate level. Maria has lectured in leadership and urban education administration.

On their next educational adventure, Maria and Corey (pictured above on their last EF tour to Egypt) are traveling with students to Japan. In the Group Leader Spotlight, Maria talks about providing travel opportunities to their students, how to recruit travelers and her ideal convention destination.

Group Leader Spotlight: Carolyn Sanders

With 15 EF tours and nine convention tours under her belt, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Carolyn Sanders, a physical education teacher at Bill Reed Middle School in Loveland, Colorado, has visited 40 countries with EF.

Besides traveling to every continent (yes, she used her EF Global Points to take a trip to Antarctica!), she’s also met some of her closest friends through EF.

In the Group Leader Spotlight, Carolyn recaps some of her favorite travel adventures and talks about how she and some other EF Group Leaders once created their own EF convention to Thunder Bay, Canada.

Group Leader Spotlight: Linda Piccolo

From attending a Wiccan wedding at Stonehenge to bribing a housekeeper to let her see the suite where Agatha Christie wrote her novels, Linda Piccolo has had her fair share of adventures while traveling abroad with her students on EF tours.

The high school English and theater teacher from Montana has even been inspired by her travels to write a play, which was published and performed by one of her drama classes last year.

In this installment of the Group Leader Spotlight, Linda shares some of her experiences, describes how important travel is for students and hints at her next travel-inspired play.

Group Leader Spotlight: Chad Brannon

Traveling has always been an integral part of Chad Brannon's life. Now, as a middle-school science teacher in Alabama, Chad is making travel an important part of his students' lives, too.

And he has the stories to prove it.

Ask him about the effect that educational travel has on his students, and he'll tell you a story about the boy who once had no direction but now credits his tour for opening his eyes, or the boy who traveled to Costa Rica and now wants to major in Spanish education and help underprivileged kids speak English, or the girl who came out of her shell after braving the zip line through the Costa Rican rainforest.

Chad—pictured above on the right with his co-group leader, John DiPlacido—is preparing to lead his fourth tour with EF, taking his students back to Costa Rica in June. He took some time out of his busy spring break to share some of his favorite stories with us:

Group Leader Spotlight: Dan Ware

It can happen at any point in life, but once you’ve been bitten by the travel bug, it’s hard to sit still. And with four trips on the horizon, Dan Ware—a history and geography teacher at Rock Bridge High School in Columbia, Missouri—is doing anything but that.

Whether he’s traveling on an educational tour to Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam or exploring Austria, Germany and Switzerland, Dan understands the importance of the lessons that take place outside of the classroom. To integrate his tours into his classroom lessons, he takes advantage of the credit option EF offers and also makes sure to teach his students some of the life skills they’ll need for traveling abroad at his pre-tour meetings.

Over the years, Dan (pictured above on a school visit in Kenya) has learned a few tricks for holding a successful recruitment, too. He shares some of his secrets:

Group Leader Spotlight: Susan Pennington

"The joy I have found in watching students learn and grow has made traveling with students one of the best decisions I’ve made in my teaching career," says EF Group Leader Susan Pennington, an English and public speaking teacher at Nerinx Hall High School in St. Louis, Missouri.

Read on to learn why Susan keeps traveling abroad and for some tips on planning an EF tour of your own.

What inspired you to begin traveling abroad with students?
When I teach poetry, fiction and creative writing, I use the images and experiences that permeate my brain to help me to understand literature and life. For me, many of these powerful images and experiences are from trips I have taken to Europe. About six years ago, I realized that if my students had similar experiences, they might make better connections between the things they study and the ways of the world, past and present.  When all this collided in my head, I decided I needed to take students to Europe to give them their own special images and experiences.

Our 10 Best of 2008

This is the 320th post of 2008 at Following the Equator, and we decided to commemorate our blog's first full calendar year with a top-10 list of favorite posts.

We had a lot of stories, videos, photos, interviews, tips and perspectives about educational travel. We launched some regular weekly features, including our Tip of the Week and Photo of the Week. We debuted Life on Tour, introduced EF on YouTube and EF on Facebook and promoted the EF Tours group on Flickr (above). And, along the way, we encountered a lot of inspiring travelers.

Following the Equator also was nominated for a Blogger's Choice Award and finished fifth out of 1,177 blogs for Best Travel Blog. Thank you to everyone who supported our blog in 2008 by voting, reading, sharing, commenting and subscribing. We're looking forward to an even more successful 2009.

Group Leader Spotlight hiatus

Our popular Group Leader Spotlight is taking a short break through the holidays but will return to Following the Equator the first week of January.

In the meantime, we're always looking for more EF Group Leaders to profile in our weekly Q&A. If you're an EF Group Leader with a good story to tell about traveling the world with students (or if you know one), please let us know. Send us your recommendations at equator@ef.com.

Group Leader Spotlight: Wayne Feece

Two years ago, high school English teacher—and EF Group Leader—Wayne Feece created the Knox High School World Travelers Club with the intention of showing his students that there was a whole world outside of their small Indiana town.

With the dream of making travel part of the Knox school experience, Wayne is helping his students realize their full potential by taking them on educational tours with EF.

Wayne (pictured above at Stonehenge) discusses why travel is so important to his students, how to win over parents and how to teach cultural etiquette before the tour:

Group Leader Spotlight: Jeremy George

A few years ago, Jeremy George, a high school history teacher from Springfield, Missouri, had never traveled abroad. Then he found EF.

Since taking his first group abroad, Jeremy has traveled everywhere from Austria to Australia with EF Educational Tours. Next year, he will travel on tours to Amsterdam and Paris and France and Spain, and he is already planning a tour to England, Ireland and Wales in 2010.

Jeremy—pictured above with students in Australia (he's in the black-and-blue jacket to the right of the guy in the cool hat)—talked with us about the "irreplaceable experience" of travel, establishing a reputation for taking students on tour and his own dream tour of Italy:

Group Leader Spotlight search

Our Group Leader Spotlight is taking the week off, but we're still looking for more EF Group Leaders who want to be featured in our weekly Q&A.

Are you an EF Group Leader with a good story to tell about traveling the world with students? Do you know an EF Group Leader whom we should profile?

Send us your recommendations at equator@ef.com. We'll resume our Group Leader Spotlight next Wednesday.

Group Leader Spotlight: Joyce Schaller

EF Group Leader Joyce Schaller, a high school English teacher from Nokesville, Virginia, knows there is nothing quite as exciting as learning about literature by experiencing it firsthand. That's why she takes her students on educational tours with EF.

Joyce—pictured above with her students at Hadrian's Wall in Scotland—took the time to tell us more about why travel is so important for her students, connecting her curriculum to her tours and where she wants to go next: