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…

Elsewhere, I have talked about the unusual summer transition of this year – the first in a while without significant timetable, structural, staffing or specification change. What I’ve had an opportunity to do with that continuity is to reflect on our teaching and learning, and start applying the reading and research I’ve been doing in to some kind of practice.

So, at the end of the last academic year, I sat down with my Year 10 and Year 12 students, and talked about the ideas of supporting learning in different ways.

What was the context?

Previously, I’ve taught in lessons. Each lesson had a set of resources – normally I’d keep it only to the handouts I wanted to give (e.g. a map, or some diagrams) and my teaching resources. My scheme of work had a clear sense of what was being taught in each lesson, and so what I’d typically do is print the resources for each lesson. This tends to chunk out the lessons – when I’ve only got one set of resources, it’s very difficult to “move on” to the next bit of the unit, even if I’ve got through everything I wanted to teach. Additionally, because I was focused on lesson delivery, the opportunity for questions and context-based reviews of knowledge were limited – I didn’t come to each lesson with a set of linked exam questions.

Student feedback highlighted the following considerations:

• Each lesson was clear, and they understood the context of the work that we did in each lesson. However, while it was obvious that I knew where we were going – and they were happy that I was organized and knew the ‘direction of travel’, it was harder for them to see the links as they were learning it. Often, it made sense in revision and retrospect – but I needed to be clearer about the schema I was building with them, rather than just keeping it implicit.
• Students were spending a lot of time reproducing diagrams or key knowledge, with varying degrees of accuracy. What they wanted was excellence in those areas, so they could repeat and practice from the best possible platform: not an initial, slightly unconfident starting point.
• Students wanted the opportunity to review knowledge more regularly, and to practice questions tied specifically to each section of the course – rather than having all of the questions in a single resource. This was felt to be a bit ‘overwhelming’ and intimidating – though helpful in revision mode.
• In addition, what I wanted to do was have a better clarity over the connections, debates and discussions that we had. I knew that we talked about them in class – but I wanted all of the students to have all of the points of consideration.

On reflection, I think that the best of my students – those who had well developed study skills, and were proactive in their ability to connect my teaching together to build their own schema – were getting an excellent experience from my lessons. However, I wasn’t convinced that all of my students were taking the same outcomes away – and I wanted to change it.

What did I do?

Having read – and been convinced – by various subject experts on the value of booklet design, ranging from Freya (@fod3) to Adam (@adamboxer1), together with my own Science colleages (@amyjv), I wanted to trial the work using booklets to bring together the learning more coherently. However, with an exceptionally high opportunity cost, I focused my attention on Key Stage 5. This is a result of a few factors: i) I knew the content and stability of the specification best; ii) it was an area where I thought the biggest improvement and ‘closing of gaps’ could be made, and iii) I am the only teacher of Physical Geography – so I could write the content, without having to discuss, review and negotiate ideas with colleagues. While this would be exceptionally valuable, it’d also take a lot more time – and attention – than we could spare. So KS5 Physical Geography was my focus.

My aim – because I love absurdly ambitious targets – was to write all of the booklets in advance. This hasn’t happened. I’ve been able to plan 3-4 weeks in advance, and do ‘units’ of work at a time. Even this has been transformative in my teaching and student learning – but having them in place for next year is a concept that I can’t even get my head around right now.

Booklets have been prepared with a mixture of resources – including the diagrams, maps and key images that I would previously have handed out as single sheets. However, I’ve also provided far more in the way of writing frameworks, key questions, and the exam practice questions for each section. I have printed each ‘unit’ at a time – students have the bundle to start with, and we just work through the content. At the same time, I’ve consolidated my teaching resources in to a single slide show – rather than having an individual power point per lesson – and so I have streamlined and reviewed that resource, as well as building the booklets. These materials are easier and simpler to upload on to our VLE!

I do feel like this has changed the way I teach at KS5 – so much so, that I’m considering biting the workload bullet, and extending it out to KS4 as well….

What has gone well?

• While it comes at high time cost, the process of reviewing and really thinking about what, when and why I want to teach the varieties of components for each unit has been incredibly valuable. In lots of cases, I’ve shuffled and edited the focus of my work, and thought about different approaches and angles. That’s been great!
• I am also in a fairly unique position of having multiple KS5 classes: I teach two Year 12 and three Year 13 sets, so there is actually a decent time benefit that comes back. It’s also been interesting to see how iterations of the teaching (effectively, I’m able to teach the Year 13 material three times, and adjust each go!) have adjusted and shaped expectations of what I can do with the material.
• I feel like the planning and preparation to include questions and structures has been really beneficial. I already know where I will take students, and so do they: the unit questions are clear and set out at the start. It also provides opportunity for review and reflection together, and a much clearer sense of practice. It’s not quite SLOP-style; but the questions are now explicitly tied to the content material.
• My teaching style has changed. Instead of “lessons”, I’m talking about units of work and connecting things all the way through. It’s much easier to make the schema visible, and to connect the ideas from the beginning. Students can see what we’re doing, how it connects and why – and I don’t really have ‘lesson plans’ any more. Instead, I just pick up with a Rosenshine-esque review of previous content, and turn to the new page in the booklet.
• Handing out the sections of the booklet at one time – rather than pre-printing the whole thing – was originally a workload strategy: I simply didn’t have that level of preparation and material. However, I think it’s benefitted the students. They haven’t been overwhelmed with “all the stuff” we’re going to do: they have just done ‘the next thing’.
• Students’ work is much more organized. They have clear pages, headers, and even page numbers. When it’s all pulled together, then I anticipate being able to provide a ‘table of contents’ that is significant steps above the average level of organization in previous years.
• I feel like the integrative approach of the visualizer to demonstrate and model analysis – on images, diagrams and key ideas – is still really powerful. The booklet has provided clear space and structure for me to do that – and this is something I want to work on. In the next iteration, I think I want to have pre-prepared the diagrams and annotations to a certain extent – I’ve done some live modelling, and it’s helpful – but I would like to be able to get around and see student work more!
• The pace of my teaching and content coverage has changed significantly. I am 2-3 weeks ahead of where I was this time last year (remember, no structural change), because there’s far fewer “wasted” lesson time opportunities. No padding out, or looking for something to do to finish the last 15 minutes – just on to the next component! Not quite finished? No worries, we’ll just pick it up as part of the review next time. At times, this has felt frighteningly quick: I have been worried about what I’m missing out on, and what I haven’t taken the time to look at with the students – but their learning suggests that I needn’t be terrified of the pace.

What do I need to think about and improve upon?

• Unquestionably, the biggest change that I’d like to make is in having them all ready in advance: rather than working 2-3 weeks ahead of the students. However, I do recognise the perhaps unhealthy level of expectation this puts on my shoulders: I’ll try and manage that appropriately!
• I think the content delivery is working well: but I’d like to actively plan more AfL and review stages in the booklets and teaching. I have gained a lot of time from streamlining the teaching: I’d like to buy some of it back in really consolidating and assessing that knowledge. I am considering setting aside a full lesson to do review and recap of old (and potentially very old!) content as a building platform.
• I’d like to improve the delivery of modelling and the integration of how these things work for visualizer teaching. At the moment, it’s improvised – I hadn’t considered it when I started – and I should have! I would have considered refining some of the structures if I’d thought it through in advance.
• Copying costs have potentially increased. It’s hard to see where I can reduce that – I’ll have to look carefully at what I use this year, compared to previous, and how I can possibly streamline it (e.g. double sided, look to reduce colour implications vs black & white)

I am very much at the beginning of the journey to teaching like this: only a half term in, but I feel very positive about what I could go on to do. I need to be mindful of the opportunity-cost components, and to really assess the *value* of the impact, rather than simply the shiny booklet that I’ve produced.

Would love to have feedback and thoughts from those who are further along the booklet pathway! What are the likely journeys? What are the next stages, and common challenges?