Contribution to a book chapter on scaffolding with Alex Fairlamb & Rachel Ball

In most specifications, the opportunities for extended essay writing are not really present in GCSE Geography for most students. As a former examiner, whilst a few really talented Geographers might wring something unusual and different from a 9 mark question, the majority are fairly predictable. They may not have a single common structure to all questions (pro/con/conclusion) or to all paragraphs (PEE, WHW), or have consistent use of examples or case study materials, but students can often confidently build on the thinking they have done at KS3 to generate success in these essay questions. Success in a GCSE Geography paper does not rely on mastery of essay technique; but rather the consistent delivery of effective question response against the clock, on a diverse range of topics, skills and question types.

But as the Assessment Objectives shift dramatically at A Level, to achieve the highest grades, the variety of knowledge is taken for granted. Candidates are expected to show mastery of their knowledge, and write for a professional Geographer audience. Simple structures like defining terms and key terminology, are far less relevant to the answer and marking unless it’s important to your essay (e.g. “weather” versus “climate” as part of the exam question). Describing and narrating the “geography” of what happens (process, explanation, description of a case study) will get you to the top of Level 2.

Far more important is the role of ‘evaluation’ and assessment, and the ability to recognise and construct a viable thesis argument in response to a stimulus (photograph, source, data) or essay question. This needs careful thought and scaffolding, both in terms of teaching, and in terms of getting student practice to write the essays effectively. There are two key skills that need to be considered and taught separately.

Essay Plans, not Writing Essays

For both, I think one of the key scaffolding strategies for student success is practicing essay planning rather than writing essays. In terms of cost-benefit of time and motivation, it is a quicker and higher-leverage strategy for students to get a sense of what they need to be doing. There is – of course – valid reason to practice writing a long-form essay, and to constructing paragraphs and flow, particularly against the clock, and to get feedback on it. In the early stages of an A Level course, however, I believe that writing solid and detailed essay plans (and building up a bank of them, to use as revision) is a far more valuable way to spend time.

Scaffold One: Know the Box

Modelling this planning and decision making process, and offering insight in to expert thinking is the first key scaffolding technique that teachers need to explore. Essay questions are often framed in the sense of “this statement” – do you agree?, or “to what extent is X important for Y”. At GCSE, this was usually an explicit comparison, and early Year 12 students will often just write an essay on the pros and cons of the stimulus only. But at A Level, it’s important that students recognise this for what it is – an implicit opportunity to compare this thing against others in a similar area of the specification, and come up with a discussion. It’s important that we teach ways to identify “what else could it be?”, as part of the synoptic journey of learning.  

In my A level teaching, we called this “knowing the box” – the area of the specification that the question was drawn from, and being confident that we could pivot between each of the lines of it, depending on which factor was named in the question. Here’s an example from my A Level booklet on rivers, looking at causes of flooding:

Normally asked as a “to what extent”, they tend to pick one factor, and ask you to assess it compared to others.

1. Flash floods (pluvial) are caused when there’s simply too much water – these can overwhelm any conditions. Focus on physical volume of rain or antecedent conditions.
2. For most fluvial events we should look at the scale of human vs physical
3. Human factors – same as hydrograph, drainage basin: modifications, stores, land use changes, urbanisation AND the extent to which it’s managed well
4. Physical factors – same as hydrograph, drainage basin: size, shape, soil/permeability, rock type, slopes, vegetation, land use and antecedent moisture (already full?)

e.g. Assess the extent to which floods are caused by human activity.

We can see that there are two key themes – human causes and physical causes. Each has a number of factors that must have been taught first, and we will have discussed ways that case studies and examples can be used to illustrate each of these points. The aim of this is a prompt to scaffold “box thinking” rather than to give all the answers. I could ask students to write three essays: one on “to what extent is it human?”, one on “to what extent is it physical?” and “to what extent are pluvial and fluvial floods similar?”. Instead, we’re supporting them to learn and know the box. Their job is to respond to the question prompt first, and then talk about the rest of the box. If they were asked about physical instead, they write that block first, and then say “but it could also be, and might be linked to…”. 

As part of the teaching, each “box” on the specification would have an essay plan template like this in our booklet. For the first one, I will model it first on the board, or on a visualiser. By the second or third, I’m handing over that box thinking to the students to lead, and then discuss together. By the end of the unit of work, we’d have completed and marked all of the essay plans and shared them together. In lockdown teaching, we also co-constructed these via Teams – and all could then share in the document we’d constructed as part of our A Level course.

Scaffold Two: Scaffolds for Evaluation

In the first example, the scaffold gets the student one step further – they are able to acknowledge the multiple implicit dimensions of the question, and talk about them. But they have not addressed the ‘evaluative’ element, yet. “To what extent” is an implicit evaluation. Sometimes, the question might be more explicit “Evaluate X in the process of Y”, but students needed to know how to make judgements and critically reflect on the different parts of the box.

It’s important to identify what could it depend on. As part of the teaching and discussion, A Level students need to be shown the factors, and accept and recognise the complexity of the subject: it isn’t the case that there are universal “right answers”. Everything has a context. Often, it’s about development – high-income vs low-income and the relative impact of money on what can be done for management approaches and who chooses to spend the money. Sometimes the factors are physical – it might work one way for fluvial floods but very differently for pluvial; or for hard rock versus soft, or constructive versus destructive boundaries etc. In teaching the material, these factors need to be explicitly drawn out for the relative novice learners: while they are obvious to expert graduate teachers, they need to be signposted.

Then, the second part of scaffolding is to help students to come to some judgement structure. They have identified “the box”, and recognised that there are three aspects to talk about – how do they judge which is most important, or evaluate the extent to which one is more critical than another? Let’s look at two comparative scaffolds that might help, with an example from the Hot Arid Environments booklet:

Evaluate the importance of the role of Pleistocene pluvials in the development of desert landforms. [20]

Question typically phrased as extent to which landforms of deserts are the result of one of the three things: you are expected to evaluate that with reference to the others, and make a conclusion.

1. Aeolian – small/constant, limited by height. Show examples & landforms
2. Fluvial – small/intermittent, ephemeral water limits. Depends on aridity levels.
3. OR – fluvial at a large scale likely to have needed lots more water, i.e. past conditions to be wetter à pluvial periods à last example was in the Pleistocene. Depends on time and location
4. Evaluation could be on effectiveness (how many landforms), scale (how wide spread are those landforms) or rate (how powerful is the force for shaping an individual landscape). Always need to consider RELATIVE power/magnitude/frequency – water has big impact on relatively weak land, but not very often. Wind has weak power, but quite a lot of it!

Here, the first three lines of the essay planning prompt show the box. There’s a set of aeolian processes (wind) that students can describe, explain and say how they help. There’s a set of modern fluvial processes (water that flows every now and then), and there’s a set of past processes that occurred a long time ago (in the Pleistocene period) when it was much wetter (pluvials). Describing and explaining all of that is a significant skill. But to really master this, we need to be able to judge which we think is most important.

There are a few ways of stimulating that conversation. If it’s a binary “this or that”, a “washing line” debate can be helpful. You define the two ends of the line as the extremes, and ask students to identify where they think they want to put the peg. In the middle? 50/50? 60/40? 70/30? They can then use the sides of the line to annotate and identify the key points they want to make in support of one side (or the counter arguments to the other).

This doesn’t tend to work so easily for questions like our deserts example, though. There are three parts – how are students to identify where on the washing line model that might go? In this example – and ones with multiple factors – a pie chart might work better. We provide (or quickly sketch) a circle, and ask students to fill up the pie chart with different factors – most important first. As before, the students can fill up (or annotate around) the pie chart with the key factors that they want to use in their paragraphs to explain and justify those factors as important.

The critical follow up conversation is “explain why you put the lines where you did”. This requires students to evaluate why they ranked one thing first, or allocated this proportion of “extent” to one factor rather than another. Their judgements and evidence for this conversation are exactly the kind of critical discussion that pushes them towards those highest marks; and this approach can replace essay planning as a concept of bullet point lists or paragraphs – students can quickly assign the lines, and use in exam conditions!