Teaching is a profession where, often, what you do outside of your classroom role is potentially more powerful and impactful than the lessons you teach in your subject. For many teachers, too, it’s one of the cherished parts of the job – the thing that makes it feel vocational, perhaps even the reason you got in to teaching in the first place. Often, they are the highlights of a term, but can also be the thing that puts you under the most pressure: they are the bits of your role that have to be squeezed around the fixed lessons and commitments, and can sometimes be the things you are least trained for.

For me, this is encapsulated in the autumn term by the work that goes in to preparing students for university applications. While this sounds reasonable, and is often a job delegated to form tutors and perhaps Sixth Form leaders, it’s actually a really complex mixture of many of the following components:

• Helping students to organise and support visits, open days, and research programmes. 
• Helping students to identify course choices, and research and understand the components of what they might want to study. 
• Helping students to identify where they might want to study. Supporting ambition, tempering over-ambition, helping them get to the right level for them. 
• Navigating the difficult discussions and decisions where students cannot make up their minds, and need guidance on the relative merits of deferred entry, or applying a year later, sandwich degrees, gap years, have too broad a choice approach, or cannot quite reconcile all of these things with expectations.
• Supporting and managing the process of predicted grades, and how they are issued, debated and evidenced if appropriate for your school environment. 
• Supporting students to complete the physical application form, and understanding all of the small components that can be tripping them up. For example, fee codes, or qualifications to solve and how all of that needs to be exact and perfect!
• Supporting students to write personal statements, particularly when they are so diverse and may include difficult narratives. 
• Supporting tutors and teachers to write meaningful and suitable subject and student references, which are tailored to a complex choice that might not have been made yet.
• Supporting tutors to write effective and meaningful references which combine the subject references to give the best story of the candidate. 
• Being able to manage the process of pre interview assessments for early applicants, including the myriad preparations for different testing requirements across subjects at Oxford and Cambridge, or Art Foundation courses with portfolios and requirements. 
• Supporting students to prepare for interviews, including arranging practice interviews and trying to get subject support and specialists in place. 
• Supporting Heads of Department in helping these students, especially in subjects where the staff might not have the relevant Oxbridge experience themselves to conduct and prepare mock interviews. 
• Being able to give consistently good and fair advice which doesn’t rely on your own perceptions, bias or interpretation. 
• Navigating potentially difficult or tense conversations with parents and students where there is uncertainty or conflict over those things. 
• Navigating the support and coaching of colleagues for whom this is a new experience, whether they are form tutors, subject teachers, or Heads of Department. 

This isn’t an exhaustive list, and I’m sure that there are plenty of things that I have forgotten. Many of these things are a joy and a privilege to do, and I have been very lucky to work with some excellent people in these roles. 

What I find interesting, though, when I reflect on it, is that I have never really had anything vaguely approaching training on almost any of it. A previous Head of Sixth Form has helped coach on how to write some references, a few years ago, but I don’t think that I have ever seen many courses, INSET or options to get better at it. 

That is quite worrying, I think. This massively important component of Sixth Form teaching, and perhaps a major aspiration for students and schools, seems to be precariously balanced on a limited knowledge and experience base. Now, undoubtedly, there are excellent people out there, and I hope that my own practice in this has been informed by my work, research and thinking, and I’d hope that the outcomes I help to generate are right for my students. 

But when we pay lots of attention to the building blocks, and not so much attention to the gaps in between, there are risks. I’d like to see much more advice and support given, on a wider basis, to UCAS advisers and schools, and I think there is a big role for bigger organisations to play in doing this. Many universities quite rightly focus on outreach and supporting students, and I think there is a gap in provision of training. Perhaps the MATs and wider trusts have a more joined up approach to this, but I cannot comment on that, as I’ve not got much experience with it!

So if you have been involved in UCAS and university support this term, I salute you. Yours is a vital part of student ambition and aspiration, and it may not be glamorous but it’s critical. I hope you have enjoyed it, and I hope it has been valuable to you. And, in some distant unknowable time, or results day, whichever is sooner, I hope it all pays off exactly how you and your students deserve it to!

Across the country, thousands of schools, teachers, families and children spend time at Parents Evenings. Students and parents are trying to find out how mock exams have gone, and they need to meet their teachers to discuss that. For many there’s a similar sight and refrain: a small appointment window, a teacher with a big spreadsheet of data, and a snatched conversation about which bit of the mock exams didn’t quite go well for the student.

For the student, this is information they sort of already know – they’ve sat through the feedback lesson – but for the parent, there’s a whirlwind of numbers, data, topics and things that they can’t possibly assimilate all at once – and yet, they’re trying. Scratching little notes in a book, or on the back of the appointment sheet, in the hope of trying to remember something helpful by the time they have survived their tenth appointment and made it home.

But it doesn’t have to be like this.

One of the key principles of the Department culture that we’ve been building together is that there should be “no surprises”. We don’t want to have all the information, centrally held by a spreadsheet in a teachers’ hard drive somewhere – it’s interesting, but we aren’t going to change it there.

We have to move information to the people who need it

To change the outcomes, we have to move the information to the people who need it. This is something I learned from the rather excellent TED Talk and book by Captain Marquet (@ldavidmarquet) – who did this kind of leadership transition on the somewhat sharper end of nuclear submarines in the US Navy! His book – “Turning the Ship Around” is an excellent counter-argument to top-down centralized management techniques, and I thoroughly recommend reading it, and trying to figure out how much you can apply to your school’s context!

So, what we do is move that information. We produce a letter for parents evening. On it, we put some key information:

• Student name, teacher name. Obvious, but this *is* a personalized letter, and it’s important that we know who to give each one to!
• What is our exam board? What is our specification code? When are exam dates – the timetable has now been released, so let’s share that with parents too.
• What did the student achieve last time? This gives us context for our conversation: we were *here*, and what’s changed since then?
• Information on the current performance of the student. We break this down by units for each paper they have sat, and give information to parents about topics/themes/content. Because our eight mark questions are also quite tricky, we track those specifically, and we show parents the performance of the student in those questions.
• Overall grades and performance, including the exam grade boundaries so they can look at where they stand.
• Changes in performance – have they improved since their last assessment, by how much, and what are we proud of?
• Information on how to access our revision resources (VLE address) and what they can expect there.
• Space to make notes for the parents & students.

Now obviously, this is a huge amount of information to pull together. If there was a need to write this, per student, it would clearly take hours – and while it’s a nice idea, it’s certainly not worth that amount of opportunity-cost, particularly after the team have just finished marking the mock exams in the first place.

But it’s just what we have in our tracking data anyway. So what we do is set up a template letter, and just run a mail merge – inserting the fields, one by one, from our spreadsheet, in to the letter form.

Once you’ve thought through what you want in your template, running the mail merge is really straightforward – and then Word will allow you to produce individual letters. Print them out, distribute them to your team – and voila! – a personalized set of information that makes for meaningful, effective and direct conversations.

Our parents find it really helpful to have the information all in one place, and it makes for effective and useful discussions with the student: they are not spending time processing what to think, or what numbers to write down.

Our students find it confirms the “no surprises” culture we’ve embedded in the classroom: they are able to talk to their parents about which bit of the paper they didn’t get on so well with, or what they’ve already identified in the feedback lesson.

Our teachers find it makes parents evenings efficient: we can get our messages and key thoughts across in a simple and effective meeting, cutting down time wasted, and making the conversations productive!

Move the information to the people who need it, with a mail merged parents evening letter. Try it? Let me know how you get on, and what you do with it? I’d love to have your examples, thoughts and feedback!

Why do I teach Arid Environments?

Many UK schools and teachers do not teach Hot Arid Environments at any Key Stage. It is easy to see why: many of our students have no direct experience of them, and familiarity with the landscape is always perceived as helpful. We tend to teach that which we know in the UK instead: rivers, coasts and hazards, and if we want a touch of the exotic, we might do Glaciation and Ice!

And yet, I’d argue that Hot Arid Environments are critical to our understanding of the planet and key environmental issues, and the teaching of them is much simpler and more accessible than many people think they are. I hadn’t ever studied Deserts until I started teaching – despite working with some notable figures in Arid Geomorphology at university – and it wasn’t until my first year that I started to work with them, and see how they worked.

Now, they are among the most popular of units for my A Level students. I think part of that is that it’s genuinely new and exciting – it’s hard to get interested and enthusiastic about the third time you’ve done coastal engineering – and part of that is that deserts have a logic and satisfying “ahh” to their understanding. You can “get it” quite quickly – and make sense of something which hitherto looked incomprehensible and alien. I think we often underestimate how powerful that can be in terms of motivation and satisfaction for our students.

In this article, I’d like to talk about some big ideas involved in teaching of them: and explore the key concepts, the key strategies and the key misconceptions in setting up the teaching of Arid Environments for the first time.

Key Concepts:

Most Hot Arid specifications cover the same concepts in terms of big ideas and topics.

1. How do deserts form?

For most topics, this is the “distribution and cause” section. You are normally asked to define aridity (either rainfall, or aridity index), describe the distribution of deserts across the world, and see how they are different and show a full range of environments. Often, this links to environments and biome distribution from before, together with the opportunity to do climate graphs and interrogate the type and nature of the climate. Doing this – building from very familiar skills and components – is one of the key strategies here: to help students feel confident as soon as possible with the material. In some specifications, this can lead in to ‘charactersitics’ of the climate: concepts like diurnal range, seasonal temperature variation, katabatic winds and wider salinity, together with the basic idea of water availability and the potential for that to be very seasonally significant.

This is also a good opportunity to get involved in the ‘scale of aridity’ conversation, and introduce early the idea that not all deserts are the same: varying in terms of levels of aridity, or foundation geology and type (erg, hamada, reg). This is a key theme that we want to emphasise during the course – it’s an excellent “it depends” for evaluative essay writing at the end.

The next component of this unit tends to look at what factors cause deserts to form. Early on, we want to be clear that the “formation of a desert” isn’t the same as “desertification” – we want to avoid that misconception later. Typically, we’ll look at the big scale (e.g. pressure/wind patterns, Hadley Cell causing constant aridity) and the contributory factors (e.g. continentality and local wind patterns, cold ocean currents, and the rainshadow effect. Like any physical process, this is about linking cause and effect with clear diagrams; and then looking at examples to explore how they combine and make deserts worse. It’s interesting to define plenty of desert examples, and look at which bits are caused by what.

It’s helpful to start structuring that environmental discussion, and show the concept that hyper-arid deserts are the ones which have multiple factors of aridity, rather than just one. Again, thinking structurally about “which is the biggest factor?” or “which is most important?” or “is continentality the most important?” helps them to think about how this will work and how they would evaluate the factors.

2. How do deserts work to produce a landscape?

Often, this is the component of the teaching that people feel less comfortable with, because there are lots of landforms and strange terms to get used to.

Again, start with the familiar. “Geophysical fluid dynamics” is a really fancy way of saying that all fluids behave in similar ways, so it’s just like rivers, in a lot of respects. Deserts are shaped by a combination of three things: the wind (Aeolian processes), modern water (running water) and water from a past time (Pleistocene) when it was much wetter (pluvial period) because of major climate changes (Pleistocene pluvials). There are some very accessible introduction clips from things like Professor Iain Stewart’s Power of the Planet which shows the changed conditions really nicely: and shows the flow and shape of the landforms. It’s sometimes a fun exercise to show some landforms and guess “water or wind” – and it can occasionally be a nice stretch to include non-Earth landscapes (e.g. here, with Martian sand dunes).

Once we have established the origin of the process, we can look at what they do. Like our rivers, processes tend to have desert parallels: there is erosion, transport and deposition. One of my key tactics is to say “what do we expect from rivers?” and look at why it’s the same or different. So, for example, there’s no ‘solution’ transport because we can’t dissolve sand in to air like we can in to water.

The core processes of weathering, erosion, transport and deposition can be split up in to “fluvial erosion” vs “Aeolian erosion”, and I tend to try and group my teaching of the various landforms in to categories to help their thinking along. I’ll teach all of the Aeolian landforms together, and then try and connect them up as a ‘landscape’ – showing how deflation/erosion, transport and deposition connect up to produce the big picture of the desert.

For water, the modern water landscape connects up through wadi and high mountainous regions, out on to the intermontane basin/salt lake environment. For many students, the direct parallel to the long profile of the river, and the connection to how that all fits together makes a lot of sense, and it’s a strong landscape to review and explore.

The biggest challenge is normally the “past water” environment: conceptualising the magnitude and time scale of the erosion processes to produce a dissected fluvial landscape is absolutely alien. Here, I find that a clearly drawn diagram showing the evolution of the landscape, and then connecting that to specific panorama/analysis and views of the key examples (e.g. Monument Valley, Utah) on Google Earth, tends to overcome the conceptual blocks.

• How do things survive in the desert?      

Adaptations to the desert are probably the best known and simplest to teach of all of the core desert units. In part, this is because they’ve done it a lot in Biology/similar, and the idea of adaptations is not too alien. There are often direct conversations about net primary productivity and measures of biodiversity and processes, or physiological adaptations versus behavioural adaptations.  

In part, I think it’s because many of the adaptations are very memorable and specific – and although there *can* be a lot of technical vocabulary to come to terms with, the evidence of adaptation and what is involved is quite simple and self-evident. There are some excellent YouTube clips of specific animals (shovel snouted lizard dancing, sidewinder snakes attacking, and desert foxes prancing), and pictures of baby camels always generate an ‘aww’.

This is a great opportunity to reinforce some prior learning: what are they adapting to? What are the climate characteristics that cause the problem? Is it the same for all? What deserts are easiest to adapt to, and why? Which deserts are hardest to adapt to, and why?

• How do we manage the desert?

The final component of most topics looks at desertification and how we manage deserts. This is one of the most complex issues to solve, and being able to unpick the variety of causes and complicating factors often overlaps significantly with human geography course components. Many students quite welcome the chance to be back on the familiar ground of “management”, and the classic top-down vs bottom-up debates that they are accustomed to in development conversations. Again, the emphasis on “what kind of desert?” and “what level of development?” tend to be quite helpful in framing and debating some of the bigger evaluative issues involved. This is a nice way to review the unit, and come back to real people and real lives.

Key Teaching Strategies:

For me, the first teaching strategy is obviously to know the material. With deserts, this is particularly key for teachers: particularly if you’ve never learned it explicitly yourself. Often, this is a case of reviewing and brushing up on some knowledge in various places, so you may want to go to different places to have a look at these ideas. The Dictionary of Physical Geography is a technical reference guide that can be invaluable, and Waugh’s classic “Integrated Approach” has a very good reference section for Deserts that rings very true at the macro scale.

Elements of certain shows (e.g. Power of the Planet, How Earth Made Us, both by Prof Iain Stewart; natural world programmes like Planet Earth) can be great for specific processes, or visualising key adaptations and responses.

In terms of specific teaching strategies, I find the following considerations to be helpful:

• Connections to previous knowledge and physical processes: making the specific links between their familiar knowledge (like rivers, or atmospheric processes) and the unfamiliar application of these processes to the arid environment is really helpful. You can extend this by questioning and exploring the similarity/difference – why is the water more powerful *here*? Why is this more effective than in rivers? Why is this more critical for a desert?

• Landform Analysis: I teach using a template (4S/PEN), which allows students to look for the same things and components in every landform we do. This gives a frame of reference for descriptions (the 4xS components of Shape, Size, Structure, Situation/Site) and the explanation of process (Process, Explanation, Normality). The use of this approach allows them to understand that we can look at all landforms in the same way, and have confidence in saying *something* about an unfamiliar landform or feature. Like every landscape and physical geography process, there’s a need to be able to sketch and explore the landscapes.

• Grouping “landscapes” vs “landforms” helps to connect up the big ideas in their mind, like upper/middle/lower course in the river. Again, this is about structures for me: how do I set up the teaching, so I do a bunch of things together, talk about how they connect – maybe even do a past question or consolidate that, and move on. It’s important to plan the ‘blocks’ in advance, and to know what kinds of themes are normal for your specification. For me, the questions are inevitably themed around “process” – so aeolian versus modern water versus past water. By grouping my teaching of landforms in those groups, I create the schema of learning in the students’ minds as I’m going along – I don’t then have to make sense of it later!
• Frame your teaching around the debates: on a very similar theme, the big ideas in desert management, or in desert adaptation come in “themese”. It might be magnitude/frequency, it might be human/physical causes of desertification, or top down/bottom up analysis of management. If part of your spec is evaluating outcomes, then help them think and structure the scale of the debates by the way that you teach it.

Realistically, though, the advice here is utterly no surprise to anyone who has taught any kind of physical themed unit before: it’s the same principles as you’d normally offer!

Key misconceptions:

Arid environments are “desserts”: just stop it. Don’t even let it crepe in to the start. It’s not to be trifled with. Know your roll. I could keep doing this…

• All deserts are the same/ All deserts look like hyper arid environments: The key here is to show variety in your images, videos and sources. Show rocky deserts, not just sandy ones. Show semi-arid environments with vegetation, show the change and the seasons where you can. Try to avoid the same-looking clips and pictures, and the stereotypical dune/camel/Sahara sand imagery… deserts are huge and varied, and this is a massive evaluative point at the top end of essay analysis!
• Desertification and the formation of deserts are caused by the same things. This tends to creep in towards the end: when you start looking at desertification, and students talk about the Hadley cell. It’s important to try and emphasis the role of “formation” versus “degradation” and show the changes wherever you can.
• Confusion over Aeolian vs fluvial landscapes: quite a difficult one, because ultimately this “equifinality” concept means that they look really similar if you. Teaching in blocks and chunks is key to building conceptual understanding, and then exposure to a lot of different sources and practice questions helps to build confidence with analysis and interpretation of sources.
• Confusion over types/scales of water: again, this is just about practice and getting used to the *scale* of a desert landscape. Familarity with different things and examples helps here!
• There is a solution to desertification… can sometimes be a difficult concept for students in the management components. Critical evaluation is vital: will the Great Green Wall ever really work in a poverty-ridden complex scenario like the Sahel? Really? What makes you believe this to be the case?

In an ideal world…

Deserts fieldwork can be some of the most awe-inspiring opportunities to show the world in a different light to your students. While lots of the formerly travelled North African experiences (Tunisia) might be off your list for now, Morocco is still well loved by UK fieldwork travellers. There is a huge range of desert landscapes available close to Europe, but you do end up having to drive quite a lot between sites.

Further afield, Jordan and the Middle East offer exceptional adventure – but there’s an obviously high cost; and the same can be said for West Coast USA. I’ve had really positive experiences with a few agencies and companies offering potential trips – and we used a major provider to run tours through Tunisia for years before the Arab Spring!

If anyone wants to fund me to come along as a consultant…