Globalisation is a fascinating process, as shown by the popularity of books like Dharshini David’s ‘The Almighty Dollar’ and Peter Frankopan’s ‘The New Silk Roads’, which explore the connections that link people and locations across place and space. Yet, despite all the obvious benefits that globalisation has bought, it has also been a driving factor behind issues such as increasing levels of global inequality and the recent COVID pandemic.  

In planning a new scheme of work on globalisation and preparing a walk-through aimed at improving our explanations of the extent to which the world is shrinking (Thanks to Michael Child’s book, CRAFT, for advocating the practice of our teaching explanations and to Ben Ransom for the inspiration to create a ‘How I teach…’ walk-through – see download below), I was forced to reflect upon what we mean by the world getting smaller and how in these strange times, globalisation has resulted in a shrinking of our worlds, but in a different way to which we are used.

Whereas globalisation is normally credited with making the world a more connected web of places and people through the contribution of transport, goods and communication, thus making it smaller, this same process is also the one which has led many of us to experience a reduction in our sphere of physical existence these last few months. Our worlds have shrunk. Under normal circumstances, we would be free to move and travel wherever we please. However, because of globalisation, overnight, we became restricted in our movement – until the last couple of weeks, my life since lockdown began has existed within a few square miles. In a strange way, the globalisation that has physically isolated many has also allowed for greater connection in other senses, such as through the increased traffic on video conferencing sites such as Zoom, but there is no getting away from the fact that globalisation has impacted people in a way that none of us has previously experienced.

Therefore, even though this is not what the outbreak will be remembered for, this whole sequence of events has meant that when I next teach about globalisation, there will be a new nuance and perspective added to what is discussed when the concept of a shrinking world comes around.

Gilbert’s 24/7 nursery (we’re always here – where else could we go?) has now been running for 4 weeks and despite having to navigate the very sudden transition from secondary geographer to pre-school enthusiast, there are a number of lessons I have learnt as a result of this experience that I think will be useful to remember when normality is eventually restored:

1. Routine is vital

The school day is built around routines: timetabled lessons; routines in the canteen at break time; specific routines within certain lessons or with a particular member of staff; all the unsaid things that are expected to happen at certain times in certain places. Without these routines, life becomes complicated and messy. This has certainly been my experience these last few weeks. When I have planned what we are going to do and this fits with normal expectations, the day has gone much more smoothly than when I am trying to make things up as we go along – there are certainly fewer tears and less melt-downs on the days where we all know what is coming next. With us being away from our everyday school routines for so long, it is going to be of paramount importance that those normal routines are re-established as quickly as possible when schools do re-open so that once again, certainty and predictability allows for students to focus on the key purpose of school, their learning.

2. Examples and non-examples

I have no recollection at all from our first child as to the stage at which he started learning colours, but it is my current mission to try and teach colours to our youngest. This has not been going well, which suggests I might be trying it too early, but I persevere! However, in trying to get him to distinguish between colours, I have been reminded of previous reflections on the use of examples and non-examples. Colours are a brand new concept to him, with no prior understanding to connect to what I am saying. If I just line up a lot of blue objects and tell them they are all blue, he is not necessarily going to make that connection. However, I appear to have had more success when I have shown him 2 identical objects where the only difference is their colour (e.g. a blue and a red building block), telling him; ‘This is blue’ and ‘This is not blue’. I have written on this subject previously (Africa is not a country) and therefore, when I am back in the classroom and introducing new concepts to students, am going to remind myself of how to effectively use non-examples in my explanations to enable students to gain a deeper understanding of the new idea that I am introducing.

3. TV has its uses

There have been times over these last few weeks where it has all become a bit too much and I have needed to hand over to the third parent in order to preserve my sanity. However, it has subsequently been interesting observing our eldest play afterwards and how he incorporates and builds upon the ideas and story lines that he has just been watching. As a geographer, video clips are key to bringing to life the places and processes that can only be described in shadow within the classroom. However, in the perceived need to squeeze everything in (particularly at KS4) and the (well founded) criticisms that can be directed at the overuse of videos, I often look for the shortest video possible, which tries to articulate everything that I want to cover in the most succinct manner. On reflection though, watching our son at play, it is often the TV programmes in which there is a larger narrative that provide the richest source of imagination and which he has the most questions about afterwards. Back within the classroom context, the short clips that I normally show are restricted in what they can communicate (which is often a good thing as it keeps the focus where I want it), but it does mean that students’ opportunities to connect this new information to their current schemata, or develop new schemata, is confined to the narrow sub-set of information that is being shared. To what extent are students therefore starved of some of the geographical richness of the wider and deeper context presented in extended sequences within the best of the documentaries if I only ever show them the briefest of clips? This does not mean that I am going to abdicate my responsibilities within the classroom and pass over all instruction to Sirs David Attenborough and Michael Palin, but it does mean that I might be willing to give over that bit more time to playing a slightly longer clip in order to give students more meaty opportunities to experience and consider our amazing world.

4. The world is still amazing!

I have missed the great outdoors. Being at home for the last 5 weeks has given me an even greater appreciation for the wonders of the world, including those simpler, local ones, including the springing of spring. I very much look forwards to when we are all allowed back out again and I can go back to sharing my love for out incredible home with those I have the privilege of being able to teach.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

The word ‘curriculum’ derives from the Latin ‘currere’, meaning to run the course, to race. In a secondary context, the focus, in my experience, has often been on the final charge to the finish line of GCSEs. However, in focusing so much on the final goal, it has previously been forgotten that the educational race is not a sprint, but a marathon, one that starts much, much further back than Year 11.

Although there has recently been a welcome shift to remove the distinction between KS3 and KS4, seeing a students’ time at school as one continuous journey, I would argue that we need to go further. More thought needs to be given to the continuity and coherence of the curriculum from before the time that students join us in year 7.

Up until this point, it has been a regular occurrence that in September I have encountered a new cohort of year 7 who have wildly varying experiences of geography at KS2 and who often lack an understanding of what geography is as a discipline, or of the fundamental building blocks of the subject. The first part of the year has therefore been spent having to teach the foundational knowledge and principles of geography as well as unravelling misconceptions that have previously gone unchallenged. Because students often do not understand geography as a discipline, any knowledge that they do have is not connected together in a coherent geographical schema, which leads to even more misconceptions that need challenging (see previous post for reflections on this).  

I am not blaming our primary colleagues for this. They already have an immensely hard job trying to be specialists in so many different curriculum areas, whilst at the same time having the inevitable attention seeker that is KS2 SATS, without secondary colleagues telling them that students are not adequately prepared for subjects introduced as discrete disciplines at KS3.

What I am saying is that in my experience, there has been little, if any communication at all between primary and secondary colleagues about how our curriculums are part of the same, one, long journey. This is as much our fault as anybody’s. At BVC, we talk a lot about the ‘learning journey’; about staff and students being aware about where they are heading in their learning and how what they are currently doing fits into that journey. If there is a lack of clarity as to details of the final destination, then the route to get there is going to be much more jumbled and confusing. Wouldn’t it therefore make much more sense for staff across the whole curriculum to know where students are aiming for; for staff at KS1 and KS2 to know how the work that they are currently doing with their students is laying the foundations for their future geographical education (or for any other subject, come to think about it)?

To this end, I am very excited that this last week we have begun work to remedy the situation. Working initially with one of our feeder primaries, myself and our head of history spent a thoroughly stimulating couple of hours with their head, sharing and discussing the key themes that we have identified as underpinning our whole geography (and history) curriculum (see download for our current curriculum map working document). This is just the start, but the dream is that this will become common practice across all our feeder primaries and we are very hopeful that in time, everybody will have a much clearer understanding of how KS2 flows into KS3, ultimately resulting in more proficient and effective geographers.

Dealing with misconceptions.

There are a whole range of misconceptions that creep into the wider educational debate, as clearly laid out and challenged in numerous books (see, for example, Seven Myths about Education – Christodoulou; The researchED Guide to Educational myths – Barton). However, there are also many misconceptions that appear within the classroom. In geography these often include the following:

• A hole in the ozone layer causes global warming
• Africa is a country (normally followed by a cry of anguish from the teacher)
• Development is binary (you are either an HIC or LIC)
• The Equator is the hottest part of the world because it is closest to the sun (2 for the price of 1 there)
• Tectonic plates are destructive in and of themselves
• Tertiary jobs are always better (paid, qualified, skilled)
• The greenhouse effect is a bad thing
• Plastic waste causes climate change

The fact that these misconceptions seem to persist and keep cropping up again and again, year after year with new sets of students made me think, where do these ideas come from, and how do we deal with them more effectively so that they don’t perpetuate?

Thinking about this has led me to what I see as 4 stages in the development and removal of misconceptions:

1. Formation
2. Embedding
3. Recognition
4. Challenge

Formation – where misconceptions come from

Sometimes this may be because of my own failure to adequately explain a concept, using imprecise language, or examples and explanations that confuse students more than aid them. When teaching, we must remember that students already have their own schemata into which they will incorporate any new information we give them. Enabling students to hang this new information onto relevant knowledge that they already possess is therefore key, otherwise, if we do not fully articulate the correct links to prior learning or fail to explain the new information adequately, they will just hang it onto whatever makes most sense to them, whether that is actually correct or not. However, these misconceptions can also come from anywhere else in life – conversations had at home, social media posts that have been read, information that has been heard or perceived in the media (including films and TV – a veritable mine-field of misinformation and misconception building dross). As students try to piece together all of this information that they are constantly being bombarded with, they are inevitably going to misinterpret some of what they encounter, bringing misconceptions into being.  

Embedding – why they persist

The problem with misconceptions is that once they have been formed, they often sit there under the surface without ever being identified. Unless the student is given a piece of information that challenges a misconception, they will just carry on believing that piece of ‘knowledge’ to be true. The longer that this misconception goes unnoticed, the deeper it becomes embedded in a students’ schemata as more and more pieces of information become connected to this misconception. For example, even though I never teach about the ozone layer and in the past have actively avoided mentioning it so as to not confuse the students and introduce a potential for misconception generation, there are always a number of students who write about the ozone layer when tasked with writing about the enhanced greenhouse effect and climate change. It is now my belief that this can only be because they have picked up information about the ozone layer somewhere else and incorporated it into their schemata, and because it has never been challenged by the expert (me), then they have assumed that it must be right. In order to prevent misconceptions embedding themselves further and further like this, two things therefore need to be done…

Recognition – identifying the misconceptions which are commonly encountered

First of all, time needs to be spent thinking through the misconceptions that regularly appear in our disciplines, or have the potential to appear (like the list at the start of this blog post). Some of these misconceptions will be immediately obvious and will repeatedly respawn, like some kind of undead creature, others may occasionally surprise us in a student question, piece of work, or answer and others require more effort to be hunted down. A mine of misconception identification material is the larger whole class assessments that are carried out at the end of topics or at summative points. As discussed in my previous blog post (Assessment and Feedback) and originally outlined in Adam Boxer’s helpful blog post (link here), jotting down repeated misconceptions that multiple students have is a very helpful way of simply identifying where students’ misunderstandings lie. Once they have been identified, then the next step is to challenge these misconceptions.

Challenge – how to deal with the misconceptions that exist

I believe that there are 2 approaches to challenging misconceptions:

1. Correction: Put simply, one of the easiest ways to correct a misconception is to make students aware of what it is that they didn’t understand and then teach them the correct knowledge that they should know instead, assessing them again at a later point to make sure that they have learnt it properly this time. This may involve going back and re-teaching an aspect that has previously been covered or it may mean building in some correctional teaching that links with whatever it is that is currently being taught. However, I think that a lot of correcting is done every single lesson and so am going to spend more time focusing on one specific way to avoid misconceptions in the first place.

2. Advanced planning: Where it has been identified that specific misconceptions keep appearing, the use of examples and negative, or non-examples can be strategically employed to prevent misconceptions from developing in the first place. The use of examples and negative examples is a key part of the Direct and Explicit Teaching approach, as outlined in the recent researchED Guide to Explicit and Direct Instruction (Ed. Adam Boxer). In Tom Needham’s chapter on Teaching through Examples (pages 37-53), negative examples are held up as being ‘crucial for teaching’ to show the specific qualities that are irrelevant to the concept being taught. In practice this means demonstrating what something isn’t, as well as showing what it is. For example, in recent years, a not insignificant number of students in year 10 have revealed their misconception that individual tectonic plates are constructive or destructive in and of themselves (e.g. The South American plate is destructive). They can effectively describe what happens at a destructive plate boundary, but, because it has not been challenged effectively in the past, assume that the individual plates involved must therefore also be destructive. Having identified this, the next time I teach tectonic plate boundaries, as well as demonstrating what a destructive plate boundary is, I shall also be demonstrating what it isn’t (e.g. the individual plates, the different types of crust, the different landforms found there). Hopefully, as a result of this pre-planning, this misconception will not develop in the first place and if it is already there, will be challenged at a much earlier point than previously, which is ultimately the desired end point for all of those misconceptions, whether the surprising ones, or the ones that we know all too well.  

Why the use of multiple choice is better than I originally thought.

My relationship with assessment and feedback could be described as a love-hate one. Hate because assessment has always seemed to end up becoming something far more complicated than it needs to be (think Life after Levels, which in reality became Levels after Levels). Hate because people so often disagree on the terminology of assessment, which leads to a lack of overall clarity and coherence in how it is undertaken. Hate because of the hours spent writing out feedback comments that were read once and then left to melt into oblivion, forgotten and ineffective in actually moving students forwards.

However, I am currently in a love phase. Love because of the inevitable increase in the number of conversations that are being generated by the current curriculum evolution (revolution?). Love, because of the clarity with which a number of people are currently writing about assessment and feedback, offering practical ways in which these tools can be used for the effective progression of our students. Love, because I am seeing the impact that simple, efficient methods are having on the progression of my students.

What was the catalyst for this? Well, it was actually a Maths book! Mark McCourt’s book Teaching for Mastery provided the spark for my current enjoyment. In it, he promotes the use of tightly designed multiple choice questions (MCQs) as a diagnostic method for identifying misconceptions among students. Along with Mark Enser’s very helpful reminder that feedback should be about improving the student, not the piece of work (Teach like Nobody’s Watching), this approach has stimulated a seismic shift in the way that I approach assessment and feedback.

MCQs are often maligned as a basic method for testing simple knowledge recall. Although this can often be the case, they can also be so much more than that. When MCQs are well designed, all answers are useful answers – the wrong answers revealing to you the misconceptions that a student holds.

For example, here is a question from one of our recently introduced core knowledge tests used at the end of every KS4 topic:

1. Study Figure 1 (a plate tectonic map). Where is constructive?

A	The Eurasian plate
B	Hawaii
C	The boundary between the Pacific and North American plates
D	The boundary between the South American and African plates

If a student answers A, it shows that they have misunderstood that plates in and of themselves are not constructive or destructive, but that it is the boundaries between plates that matter. Answer B shows students again have a similar misconception, but in relation to specific locations, based upon the hazards that they experience. Finally, if they answer C, it shows that they do not have a strong enough grasp of the differences between the different types of plate boundaries. This depth of understanding of what the students do not know, as opposed to what it is that they do know, has had a transformative effect on how I feedback to students.  

Once the questions have been well designed, undertaking the whole class feedback that Adam Boxer has recently advocated (blog post here) becomes a relatively straightforward process. After students have undertaken the knowledge test and self-assessed it (saving me time), I go through their results, marking down the questions where multiple students have the same misconceptions, very quickly identifying the specific concepts and ideas that require re-teaching or building in, like Boxer suggests.

Of course, this is only one method of feeding back to students and it would lose its effectiveness if it was the only approach used, but just by making this simple adjustment to how I assess students, I have found that there are less gaps in students’ knowledge and that my feedback is becoming less about improving the piece of work and more about improving the student and their knowledge, to the benefit of all involved.  

There is a special place in my heart for the Burgess Model. My GSCE geography coursework involved me walking up and down the streets of Loughborough, recording every building or land use on either side of the main roads and then converting my notes into an elaborate map of the town, demarcating all the different zones. I was very proud of the map that I produced, proving that Loughborough fitted the Burgess Model. And I got a very good mark for it!

However, as so passionately articulated by Charles Rawding in the latest edition of the GA’s Teaching Geography (Volume 44, Number 3, Autumn 2019), this model is defunct and has never sufficiently displayed the complex and dynamic nature of cities. Although I have never taught the Burgess Model as gospel, only occasionally referring to it as an example of how urban land use has been modeled, reading this article got me thinking about the importance of constantly re-evaluating the models and generalisations that we use in our teaching.

Since I was at school, there are a number of other models and generalisations that have been shown to be too reductionist, or just plain wrong and which have now been resigned to the bin alongside the Burgess Model. For example, the global divide between MEDCs and LEDCs, which I was taught at school, but which ignorantly and dangerously turned the world into a binary place where you were either rich or poor. However, whereas examples like the Brandt Line have so obviously become obsolete, I imagine that there are others out there, hiding in among our day to day teaching that need rooting out and either updating or discarding.

For example, the Clark-Fisher model. This is a model that I have used regularly throughout my teaching career to demonstrate the changing industrial structure that a country goes through as it becomes more economically developed. However, and this is something that I even tell the students, the Clark-Fisher model was developed from, amongst other aspects, the historical change that the UK experienced in unique circumstances. It was also first devised as an economic model, not a geographic model, thereby ignoring place dependent contextual data. To therefore try and apply this model verbatim to other countries is a grave generalisation and huge mistake, and yet I find it happening in my classroom. Just like with the Burgess Model, it hides the variations between locations and dismisses the contextual factors that are so important in determining how a place develops over time. For example the rapid development of employment sectors like tourism in Jamaica and financial services in Hong Kong mean that not all countries are going to experience an industrial phase in the same way that the UK did.

As teachers of geography, it is our duty to make sure that the models that we use to teach children and the viewpoints that this then engenders in them are ones that do not misrepresent the world we live in. To a certain extent, there are always going to be some generalisations as the world is far too complex a place to be able to cover every individual variation and difference, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t regularly evaluate the frameworks we are creating by which students judge the world around them.

To that end, over this next year, integrated into the review of our curriculum, we will be looking out for these out-dated models and generalisations and updating/discarding them to make sure that our students are getting the truest possible representation of the ever changing world in which they currently live.

As an aside, Hans Rosling’s Factfulness is an excellent stay on some of the prevalent misconceptions held by the public, challenging them and painting a much more positive view of the world than many people hold. Well worth a read!

Practice v. Performance.

When I was learning to play the piano, I would often just play through the piece again and again, trying to get better at it. I didn’t understand. Conversely, my violin teacher would make me practice the same little section over and over again at different speeds and with different rhythms until I could play it without hindrance. He understood. And because I didn’t, it did my nut in!

As a teacher trying to help students improve their extended writing, I would often encourage students to practice writing out long answers, before giving fairly general and therefore ineffective feedback for them to apply next time they attempted to write at length. I still didn’t understand. Another subject within our faculty had their students repeat the same process of explaining individual points and facts in a range of different contexts before completing full questions. They understood.

It has taken nearly 15 years since my violin teacher was making me question whether I was ever going to play a full piece of music again for me to realise what he was trying to teach me, that the practice looks very different to the final performance.

The idea of practice being different to performance is repeated regularly in recent publications with authors such as Mark Enser, David Didau and others all using very similar examples to those that I experienced to demonstrate that in order to improve the final performance, you need to work at the small things, the little steps that look so different, but when put together, make your final performance that much better.

But what does this actually look like for the geography student? Especially with regard to that issue where I was previously failing to effectively move students forwards, extended writing?

This is where a bit of thought is required in breaking down exactly what it means to be able to write effectively at length at GCSE into constituent parts. Having examined a number of past exam questions, recalled exam scripts and mark schemes, it appears that there are three main areas where the practice should be focused:

1. The identification of the correct geographical knowledge to use
2. The effective explanation of the facts/concepts/arguments stated
3. The detailed evaluation of these developed points

And so I found myself, during year 11 parents’ evening this week, telling parent after parent and student after student that in order to improve their extended writing in geography, they should practice something very different to what they would be expected to do in their final exam. This took the form of the following three suggestions:

1. Highlighting the key geographical terminology/geographical phrase in a practice question and then writing down all of the relevant content that they could think of which relates to that key terminology. This could be done as a list of bullet points, a mind map, or just as a series of notes. The idea being that they then get used to identifying the key area(s) of their schemata that they need to refer to whenever they see certain words or phrases in questions.
2. Creating a grid such as the one below (based upon a very good example in the Hodder AQA 9-1 Geography workbook) in which a series of points are written into the first column and where the next two columns are then used to develop each identified point, helping students to think through what each point means and thus, more effectively explaining it. (Note: This can be used very successfully in conjunction with photos or other sources where students also have to pick out key aspects of the source.)

Point/fact identified	First development	Second development
Houses are built out of scrap materials…	…so the structures are not very secure and parts can easily be damaged or fall down…	…meaning that people are more at risk of living in dangerous conditions
There are no basic amenities supplied to buildings…	…so there is no clean water supply or effective sanitation system…	…meaning that people are more vulnerable to poor health and disease

• Choosing 3 or 4 key facts that could be used in the answer to a specific practice question. For each fact, the student would then need to write an evaluative statement, making some kind of judgement about the fact. For example:

Fact	Evaluative statement
The Tohoku earthquake caused upwards of $235 billion worth of damage, making it the most expensive natural disaster in history.	Japan is very well prepared for natural hazards, which therefore shows how significant this event was to have caused so much damage to a nation which is so well prepared.

In having students practice evaluating facts in a repetitive manner, when they come to use supporting facts in their extended writing, they will be more likely to follow it with an evaluative statement, than just plonk the fact in without showing why that fact is an important contribution to the argument. At least that is the hope.

In encouraging my students to practice in this manner, I am optimistic that firstly, the students will find the practice more variable and engaging than just writing out practice question after practice question and that secondly, there will be a gradual improvement in the quality of their extended written answers. I will let you know how it goes.  

An overview of the Year 7 Geography curriculum as it currently stands.

This blog has come about following the desire to disseminate information among our geography department in a more effective manner and in order to stimulate discussion around issues that we don’t always have time to cover in departmental meetings.

In order to communicate the story of the year 7 curriculum to non-specialists who are new to teaching geography and also to remind the rest of us about why we currently teach what we do in year 7, our first departmental podcast went through the key themes, as outlined in this presentation, and how they build on each other throughout the year.