Apparently, both John F Kennedy and Adam Boxer share a philosophy on weather-related domestic maintenance – or at least, in their intent to fix the roof while the sun is shining when it comes to blended learning, hybrid environments and the lessons we’ve learned during the pandemic.

While a lot of the technological solutions now appear to be embedded or removed from teaching practice, we’ve probably learned more about what works (and what doesn’t) in delivery of online and blended learning in the last two years than ever before. A number of excellent reports and publications have emerged – I was part of the focus group discussions for this excellent piece from the Chartered College of Teaching (Muller & Goldenberg, 2021), for example – and we have a strong sense of contextual, anecdotal and evidence-informed direction to build upon.

I think it’s inevitable that we’ll have more blended learning in our future. Whether it’s more waves of COVID – and let’s hope it’s not – or just taking a more flexible approach to delivery of learning, I don’t think the challenges of becoming a ‘good online teacher’ are past us. I think we’ll have far more expectation of blended learning? Of accessible resources for students who are ill? I can’t imagine we’ll ever have “snow days” again, for example!  

So, here’s my roof reflection.

Should we be actively training teachers on how to do it? We’ve assumed that a lot of teacher training and instructional principles ‘can be applied’ to the online environment; and that’s partly true – but I don’t know if anyone has ever explicitly been taught how to teach lessons and sessions online as a deliberate exercise in part of their initial teaching career.

Should we be doing that? Should every teacher have at least a brief exposure to some of the ideas of online principles, and some idea of some of the platforms, before they join a school?

All thoughts and ideas welcomed… and any roofers gratefully acknowledged!

Over the last few days, I’ve been delighted to join in the Geographical Association’s Annual Conference focused on ‘Everyday Geographies’.

While the return to face to face conferences has been welcomed by many, it wasn’t quite the right time for me with other work commitments, so I’ve been really grateful to have the hybrid option available.  It has been nice to work as an ‘every day’ return to the subject space, and spend time thinking about Geography amongst some of the other discussions and conversations that my professional life now contains.

As the Conference comes to an end, here are five quick reflections on what I’ve learned from spending time in this space.

(1) Hybrid Spaces – well done to the Geographical Association!

While other conferences have felt like everyone was Zoom-ing in, this felt like joining a professional conference in a real space. The schedule was really well put together, and while there was always the issue of “too many things to see!”, the quality of recording and filming was outstanding. Speakers being filmed and tracked, great microphones, and brilliant presentation of the slides while we could see the speakers – this was, hands down, the best virtual attendance that I’ve ever been part of. Great job, team!

(2) Depth, diversity and quality of speakers

I really appreciated the wide range of speakers, from all sorts of worlds. We had professional Geographers, world-class experts, and people sharing their school-based perspectives or ideas about technical resources. They shared the same lecture theatre, the same status, and have the discussions together to learn from each other. That’s been hugely exciting and powerfully inspiring.

We’ve also had a huge range of speakers in terms of participation, vision and experience – lots of first-time speakers, as well as experienced GA and RGS faces and people.

(3) Plural pathways

For whoever and whatever you are, this Conference had a lot on offer. There were sessions for new teachers, Heads of Department, teacher educators, and Geographers just wishing to expand their subject knowledge. I loved hearing from Professor Ilan Kelman, for example, masterfully exploring themes of disasters as a process not an event, but I equally benefitted from Dr John Murton’s perspective on COP26, Elena Lengthorn’s education in the climate emergency session, and experienced Geographers like Mike Simmonds and Jo Payne about subject development and support. Colleagues from different professional perspectives would all have been welcomed and found something to support, extend and challenge them.

(4) Diversity on the agenda

The theme of this year’s Conference was the ‘everyday’ of Geography, and it felt like one of the everyday realities this year was the higher profile of diversity and the deliberate challenges to racism, inequality and intolerance.

As you’d expect, the Geography community are thoughtfully engaged in these challenging spaces, and lots of the curriculum conversations, personal conversations, and storytelling have all reflected the challenges of diversity and inclusion. We saw powerful representation and stories being shared, and worked examples of how people were applying the work in their classrooms. It’s not a complete solution, and the work is nowhere near finished – but it’s great to see it visibly being done, and part of the everyday conversation on

(5) How lucky we are to have this subject community.

I now work in a professional space where I can see subjects working in very different ways – and I keep coming back to the concept that the Geography subject community is one of the very best out there.

Whether it’s the relatively collegiate approach on Twitter (most of the time), the kindness and sharing of the experts in our community, or the incredible work of the Geographical Association and the Royal Geographical Society, we’re really lucky to have the community that we do. It makes a huge difference to supporting teachers, and the work of the subject.

It’s been a real pleasure to be part of this kind of discussion and professional space again – and to be part of this wonderful community. I look forward to catching up to a number of other sessions that I couldn’t see live, and I’m hoping that we can build a library of these excellent sessions for future use for training and development of teachers and trainee teachers alike!

Perhaps I’ll see you at next year’s Conference, and have the courage to have proposed a session!

The Japanese word for ‘business suit’ is sebiro. A truncated version of “Savile Row”, the word itself is a nod to the London area famous for tailoring, and the ability to have a garment made bespoke to your precise measurements, tastes and style for a considerable fee. We know that bespoke, made to measure (which apparently are not the same) and perfectly tailored are the aspirational standard. We also know that that standard takes quality, craftsmanship, materials and money. Many of us – sadly, me included – will never own a Savile Row suit.

So what?

A similar approach can be described when it comes to making and providing resources for our lessons in teaching – with the idealised bespoke, made to measure or personally tailored to our context, class and settings held up as the gold standard – and “off the peg” resources somehow considered to be lesser and certainly holding some implicit comment on our worth as a teacher, or our commitment to our class.

In particular, and in particular subjects, it seems like bespoke booklets are increasingly used, while the humble textbook is declining.

I’d like to think about why.

I believe that the way to sniff out a Geographer of a certain vintage is to ask them how they pronounce the word “Waugh”, and see how their eyes light up. David Waugh’s “Geography: An Integrated Approach” was the textbook that I had for my A level. When I taught in classrooms, over twenty years later, a bank of them were still in the bookcase at the back of my room, and certain topics could still definitively be looked up in Waugh’s classic book. It wasn’t bespoke – it didn’t get designed for a particular specification, or for a certain style of exam – it was good Geography, and that’s all that mattered.

We want our textbooks to be:

• Based on good Geography
• Clear in their use of technical language, diagrams and explanation, so that
• Processes, theories and models can be crystal clear for students
• Exemplified through case studies or place examples
• Offer reflection and questions which can check for student understanding
• Pragmatically, as a HoD or a SBM, they need to offer value for money. Either this means that they are cheap enough to buy for multiple class sets (you realistically need 2.5 x your cohort size at any given time if you want students to have one each, because you’re going to have one year group, a second year group at KS4 or KS5 and then some spares for class work or to cover wastage), *or* they need to be imbued with longevity that a one off purchase order will definitively last you for ten years or more.

Waugh’s book hit all of these boxes. They were never cheap to buy, but they lasted the test of time. They were really well written, expertly designed, and beautifully illustrated – even now, the diagrams are some of the best I’ve ever used. I can’t imagine teaching desert landforms without that page from Waugh of the various forms of sand dune, for instance.

Perhaps the only complaint – and indeed, this reflects the nature of a number of subjects (Geography, Economics, Business among many) was that the case studies could rapidly become out of date at best, and really grotesquely out of date at worst.

So you’d have to update the case studies. And then we get into the slippery slope of the modern textbook versus booklet debate, and some of the challenges that face the use of textbooks by schools today. 

• Textbooks get out of date so quickly. If you are going to have to update case studies, then you’re going to have to produce material. Wouldn’t it be easier to write your own, and print it? It might be. It depends on your Department’s expertise, capacity and specific skill sets, I guess. I think this is much more of a problem for fast moving, or case study-based subjects. A Maths textbook doesn’t date anywhere near as quickly as a Geography one can: an old colleague of mine had a bunch of resources from the 1950s in his classroom, that still offered value to some particular problems and themes.
• “Textbook case studies” are also an interesting problem from an examiners’ mindset, too. Teachers are aware of this. Where the case study in the textbook is excellent, and well-used, it is very likely that an examiner will see a lot of answers based upon it. To stand out, you’re either going to need to go beyond the textbook (in which case, someone’s going to have to work on detail), or you’ll need to write better than the majority of other candidates. You also have to get the details absolutely spot-on – it’s far more likely that an examiner will know them. It’s simpler to “stand out” by choosing a different case study: it’ll be novel for the examiner to read, and less likely to be one of twenty seven essays on the Haiti earthquake that they’ve read that day.
• “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to make a booklet?” In many cases, it’s possible that the answer is not clearly value-driven in the same way. We don’t have a metric for recording teacher time, and assigning it a value, so we don’t see the very hidden costs of the hours and labour. Doing it once is highly expensive, in teacher time. If we use the same booklets across multiple years, schools or a Trust, it could be worth it. But it’s a very different calculation, and a far harder one to see.
• “Look, we don’t even use half of these chapters. Isn’t that a waste?” Specifications offer much choice – usually at school level, rather than for students in the exam. If Section A is 2 from 3, Section B is 2 from 3, and Section C is 1 from 3 – that’s lovely as an experience for teachers and schools, but it does mean you’ve only used 5/9 chapters of the textbook. What are you paying for the other four for? What’s the point? Wouldn’t you be better just printing your own booklets for those units only? It’s a fair point. Either specs need to increase their compulsory content (not popular) or textbooks need to become modular (not likely from printing perspectives).
• “We’ve only just bought these ones for a new specification, and they’re already out of date”. This is a combination of “bespoke” to a specification or a syllabus, and the change that the exam boards make in response to requirements and wider context. If you write good Geography, like Waugh did, you’re not sensitive to the market change – but you are equally making content that might not fit some syllabuses, and we’ll see the same waste issues as before.

A series of these points all speak to ‘value for money’ for syllabus-related textbooks, and the eternal challenge of the balance between visible costs (textbooks) versus invisible costs (production of booklet, printing, time and energy etc. of teachers which is all unquantified) with some very real issues. For many publishers, the key response has been to drive down the cost of textbooks by cutting some corners – and this has created a number of other issues. When we started teaching a newly-refreshed specification, the first print run of textbooks contained over fifty errors within the first few chapters we looked at. I’m not talking minor things: but diagrams labelled wrong (constructive/destructive waves), or key concepts not accurately explained. The publishers and board were superb, and accepted the return, and published a new book fairly speedily – but that kind of error wouldn’t have happened to Waugh, I reckon.

Fast specification changes, the desire for bespoke to syllabus, and a rapidly changing market mean that it’s almost impossible to produce a long-lasting textbook which is simultaneously cheap enough to appeal to all. At high quality. With really nice examples. And good exam questions.

Of course, there’s an unaddressed market for textbooks here – which is their use for Key Stage 3. A number of excellent books operate for KS3 – the Progress in Geography series, or the Geography 11-14 series offer progression, development and well thought out models. An ‘off the peg’ curriculum could be really well delivered, and superbly resourced – but I’d be really curious to see how OFSTED would reflect on intent and implementation if they were asked to comment on it.

Some people, instead, might build their own modular approach – and again, we see a number of examples of specific topic books, which resource a topic, lessons and activities, and you can choose your way through the different topics in favour of your own curriculum design. We do, also, increasingly, see a range of ‘ebooks’ and downloadable PDFs for significantly lower cost (e.g. a browse through the GA’s shop) which address some of these issues and approaches.

I think people still struggle to justify the value-for-money element as Heads of Geography Department, given how frequently our content changes – and I can imagine that the pressure in disadvantaged schools is even higher to produce “your own” resources connected to a desire to absorb those hidden costs. Every Department will have to have their own discussion and evaluation of what constitutes good value and the right choice for them, and even in the same school and faculty, I think the subject variance will be significant. While the Geographical Association offers more publication and support than perhaps other subject associations do, we as a subject have far more rapidly changing content than others may – and that balance will depend not just on the discipline, but also the individual topic you’ve chosen. I could still teach the vast majority of an Arid Environments topic from Waugh’s classic work, even if it’s the 1990 or 2000 version, for example – I’d want to add some management examples at the end, but the core of desert formation, landforms and landscapes would stand the test of time. I couldn’t approach a human topic – least of all the rapidly changing globalisation, or economic world themes – in the same way.

All of these things have combined to create a perception of textbooks, and the use of textbooks, in a number of spaces. Undoubtedly, there are some reduced quality textbooks, or problems with their uncritical use in the classroom. I don’t think anyone would claim that one textbook can replace a thoughtful and adaptive teacher.

But I feel that there’s still a perception (or indeed, even a stigma) about the “bespoke” versus “off the peg” resource that is really interesting in terms of what it says about the teacher that uses the textbooks. Using someone else’s resources still can hold a faintly uncertain feeling for teachers – and there’s a culture shift needed around the streamlining of effort, and the recognition of where the ‘best bets’ and ‘best value’ approach lies. Are we better off spending enormous amounts of time rewriting a textbook, or being able to give really meaningful feedback to our students? Are we better off re-presenting an excellent piece of work, or resting, so that we’re able to engage, think and enjoy the classroom questioning and discussion the next day? Are we afraid of an external judgement (e.g. OFSTED) about the use of a non-bespoke curriculum resource? Or are we our own worst enemies – constantly demanding bespoke perfection? If and where good resources exist, why shouldn’t we encourage their development and use?

We may all want the bespoke Savile Row suit. Bespoke, precise, exactly for needs – it’s a wonderful aspiration, and it’s also the gold standard of what tailoring can be, if you can afford it.

But I don’t think anyone would look down on, or be snobby about a teacher who decided that off the rack in M&S or Charles Tyrwhitt was the way to go. We don’t have an infinite amount of time; we don’t have the luxury of multiple fittings and the disposable hours and unseen income that it would take to have everything bespoke.

Think about it, for a moment – if a teacher rocked up in a Savile Row suit, or a bespoke handmade dress to work – how would you react?

Now compare that with how you’d feel about a teacher using a textbook rather than their own handmade booklets. Same reaction? Different?

Sometimes, we need more sebiro than Savile Row – a recognition that our best version might be less bespoke, and more utilitarian. We should embrace that – allow people to choose their best versions for their context, and understand that supporting sustainability in teaching might be about more than bespoke.