Making Every Geography Lesson Count

Six principles to support great geography teaching

Mark Enser, Andy Tharby, Shaun Allison

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781785834042
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Mark Enser's 'Making Every Geography Lesson Count: Six principles to support great geography teaching' maps out the key elements of effective geography teaching and shows teachers how to develop their students' conceptual and contextual understanding of the subject over time.What sets geography apart from other subjects is the value placed on seeing the connections between the different parts of its broad curriculum, on building links between different topics, and on thinking like a geographer. Writing in the practical, engaging style of the award-winning 'Making Every Lesson Count', Mark Enser has set out to help his fellow practitioners maximise this value by combining the time-honoured wisdom of excellent geography teachers with the most useful evidence from cognitive science.'Making Every Geography Lesson Count' is underpinned by six pedagogical principls challenge, explanation, modelling, practice, feedback and questioning hat will enable teachers to ensure that students leave their lessons with an improved knowledge of the world, a better understanding of how it works and the geographical skills to support their learning.Each chapter looks at one of the six principles and begins with twin scenarios which illustrate some of the real challenges faced in geography classrooms. Mark then delves into a discussion on the underpinning theory and offers a range of practical, gimmick-free strategies designed to help teachers overcome these obstacles. Furthermore, each chapter also ends with a case study from a fellow geography teacher who has successfully employed the principle in their own classroom.Written for new and experienced practitioners alike, this all-encompassing book offers an inspiring alternative to restrictive Ofsted-driven definitions of great teaching and empowers geography teachers to deliver great lessons and celebrate high-quality practice.Suitable for geography teachers of students aged to 18 years.

Chapter 1

Challenge

Katie

Katie arrives at her first A level geography lesson and feels a sense of déjà vu. On the board is a picture of Old Harry Rocks with the word “Coasts!” displayed enthusiastically above it. “I bet we’re looking at longshore drift,” she thinks as she slumps into her seat. She remembers looking at this last spring when revising for her GCSE, and a year ago for her controlled assessment and doing a project on it in Year 8, as well as in Year 6. She finds it hard to remember a time when she didn’t know how waves move sediment along the coast.

Tom

Tom is sat in his A level geography class feeling lost, again. The teacher is asking how a lack of longshore drift helps to explain why geographers now think that Chesil Beach was formed as an offshore bar brought on land during sea level changes. Tom doesn’t know. He is still trying to figure out where coastal sediment comes from in the first place.

In order to think about how we plan a challenging geography lesson we need to understand the nature of progress in the discipline. This can be difficult in a knowledge- and content-heavy subject like ours, in which it can, at times, feel as though the curriculum is made up of distinct topics – silos of information – that have little in common with each other. This can lead to it seeming like students are making little progression over the year other than in terms of an accumulation of information about these disparate topics; but as we know, learning facts about coasts doesn’t necessarily lead to you being a better geographer when you learn about urbanisation.

However, the accumulation of information on a diverse range of topics is of vital importance in building an understanding of geography. Without first gaining this knowledge, we can’t start to put it together in order to see the connections. It might be that we just need to change our timescale when we think about progress in our subject and, instead of asking “What progress should students make this term?”, ask “What progress should they make between different key stages?” If we compare the work we ask students to do in Year 7 and the work we ask them to do in Year 13 we get a better sense of what progression, and therefore challenge, looks like in geography.

Liz Taylor suggests that progression in geography has certain characteristics.1 It means that students develop a broader and deeper knowledge: broader meaning that they study more topics and depth referring to the level of sophistication with which they can express ideas about them. They move from concrete examples – such as the distribution of houses in our local community – to theoretical understandings – such as the Burgess model of land use. They progress from studying things at a local to a global scale, they develop an ability to see the links between topics – that synoptic approach of combining different silos of information together – and they acquire a greater range of skills and a greater independence in knowing when to deploy these skills.

This gives us a good starting point in considering what it means to make a geography lesson challenging. We want to not only increase their knowledge of a range of topics but also ensure that they know these topics in enough depth to reach sophisticated conclusions and do this on a range of scales – local, regional, national and international. We want to make sure that they are moving beyond their own experiences and are able to apply theoretical models to a range of places. As such, we will need to ensure that they are equipped with a well-developed toolbox of geographical skills to deploy to this end.

We can see the nature of progression most clearly if we look at a topic that students study at a range of key stages, such as the workings of ecosystems. In the national curriculum for Key Stage 3, students are expected to look at the physical characteristics of different regions of the world. This might mean that they learn about the basic structures of the ecosystem in a given area – the food web, the nutrient cycle and so on – and about how human activity can affect these structures. The focus is typically more localised and there is less emphasis on drawing wider conclusions about the way in which all ecosystems work.

By the time they get to Key Stage 4, students will need to be able to contrast different ecosystems – such as those in the tropics and those in deserts – and to understand the factors that influence the nutrient cycle in these different conditions. They will also need to draw on more detailed examples of the opportunities for economic development offered by these ecosystems, and of the challenges they present. Students will need to hone the ability to apply these ideas in different and unfamiliar situations.

In Key Stage 5, the focus narrows to look at how the water and carbon cycles operate in these ecosystems, with a need to appreciate more fully the ways in which flows and stores act and are acted upon. Students are expected to be able to discuss in some depth the management strategies used to tackle changes in these two earth life support systems and evaluate their impact.

By looking at the curriculum in this way we can get a better appreciation of what “challenging” geography might look like at different points. This then suggests ways in which we can create schemes of work that build not only over a particular topic but also between key stages.

The following strategies suggest ways in which you can put this challenge at the heart of each of your lessons.

1. Know Thy Subject

What do we need to know before we begin?

In What Makes Great Teaching?, Professor Robert Coe et al. identify and analyse the features of effective classroom practice. On a teacher’s subject knowledge, they write:

1. (Pedagogical) content knowledge (Strong evidence of impact on student outcomes)

The most effective teachers have deep knowledge of the subjects they teach, and when teachers’ knowledge falls below a certain level it is a significant impediment to students’ learning. As well as a strong understanding of the material being taught, teachers must also understand the ways students think about the content, be able to evaluate the thinking behind students’ own methods, and identify students’ common misconceptions.2

Of all the factors analysed, only effective instruction was found to be as important, with similarly strong evidence on student outcomes. There was less evidence in support of the impact of the following features of classroom practice:3

♦ Classroom climate (Moderate evidence of impact on student outcomes).

♦ Classroom management (Moderate evidence of impact on student outcomes).

♦ Teacher beliefs (Some evidence of impact on student outcomes).

♦ Professional behaviours (Some evidence of impact on student outcomes).

Despite this, a lot of initial teacher training and continuing professional development (CPD) focuses more on these less significant elements, with almost no time given to developing subject knowledge itself. In response to this concern many schools have started handing CPD time back to departments. While this is a great start, it doesn’t automatically mean that there will be more time spent on subject knowledge. A huge amount of departmental CPD involves planning schemes of work, developing assessments and, sadly, administration tasks. There needs to be a real change in school culture to recognise the importance of teachers staying on top of their subject knowledge. Once we accept the value of this, there are a few things we can do in practice.

First, talk to your head of department about carrying out an honest subject-knowledge audit as a team. Remember that it is human nature to overestimate our abilities, so test your department’s by completing A level exam papers and checking each other’s work, looking at your responses against the mark scheme. Once we are aware of the gaps in our collective knowledge we can ask to set aside time in department meetings to address them. This could involve teaching each other. Learn from each other’s strengths and pool your understanding. In a department meeting, you could each teach a five-minute mini-lesson about a concept that you have been focusing on. In my school, we use this approach to cover new content when exam specifications inevitably change.

If we don’t have the expertise in the department then we need to look outside it. My school is part of a subject hub for local schools, meaning we can share the cost of bringing in subject-specific CPD training sessions. If your school does not already have these kinds of links, you could investigate the feasibility of setting them up. This usually works best if there is a local network of schools who share INSET days. In terms of find...