Tag Archives: teaching

Is twenty plenty? The place of “older” case studies in a Geography curriculum

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As a recent BBC News article has highlighted – and somewhat to my shock and disappointment – it is twenty years to the day that Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. For a while, it felt like one of the most taught case studies in the Geography curriculum – partly because of the raw impacts on a highly prepared country, but also because of the variety of imagery, resources and outcomes that we could talk about, use and evaluate.

Since then, there have been many more hurricanes in the US, plenty of typhoons and mega storms elsewhere, and a number of innovations, iterations and examples that have replaced Katrina as a case study example de jure.

Don’t get me wrong, here. I am not advocating for the teaching of Katrina as the sole example of the impacts, prediction or preparation of a tropical revolving storm – that would be what Steve Brace described as ‘a zombie case study’.

But I don’t think they should be stricken entirely from the record, and that we should only be able to teach things from “within the students’ lifetime” or within a fixed number of years either. Here’s why I think the older case studies still have some place in our teaching:

  • Similar events haven’t occurred that recently. Here’s a challenge. Try to think of an explosive volcanic eruption that caused significant impact in a higher-income country. We’ve got effusive Iceland over the years, and a few examples from Etna which were less serious and smaller scale. We could point to the 2019 White Island eruption, but despite the impact and fatalities, that is a relatively small volcanic event. So if we want to compare, we’re going to have to go back in time to something like Mt. St. Helens…
  • There are unique or specific features of them that we want to draw out. A number of events have unique geography that doesn’t occur any other time – and perhaps this is something we want to highlight to add flair, demonstrate sophisticated response, or even just show the complexity and nuance of management challenges!
  • There’s a particular connection to our community and context. Weirdly, when I taught at an SE London school, we had a Deputy Head who was originally from Texas, and had been working in New Orleans during Katrina. Being able to hear first-hand about what it was like, and ask questions of a ‘real life case study’ was far more compelling than a video or textbook example.
  • The evolution of the case study is significant. For example, it wasn’t until 5-10 years after the Haiti earthquake that we learned the true horrors and scale of some of the abuse of power of international NGOs. That’s an important story. If we only teach the things that are within the first 6-18 months, we might miss long-term impacts, or some of the human issues that we should be thinking about and teaching about.

For me, though, I think the biggest reason to be teaching about case studies like Katrina is that they build a richness and depth to our geographical understanding and stories of place. Humans are constantly adapting and evolving their management, approaches, and strategies for the challenges that we face.

I think we owe it to our students to be able to show the way we’ve developed through time – rather than just a snapshot of a single moment. When I taught earthquake management, I’d explain the theory of what was possible, and outline the steps that highly-prepared nations had taken to get there. We’d talk about how the issues that we exposed in the Kobe case study were solved by these strategies or those investment priorities, and then we iterated that a step further in the Sendai example with this law, or adjusting the focus to defend against that secondary impact. We talked about earthquake management as an ongoing evolution of learning, adapting and building more robust systems. We’d evaluate whether countries were choosing to get better and what made it possible for them to evolve – rather than being stuck in a single moment or strategy because that was where it ranked in their domestic priorities. And we’d talk about the complexity and challenge of what “management” meant, and how we kept learning more.

Talking about Katrina, and reflecting on what’s changed in the last twenty years, may well represent an “old case study” that could be updated – but for me, the richness of the conversation and the discussion is a key part of how we do great geography, even if it makes me feel very old.

We need to invite students to be part of the palimpsest of constantly shifting and constructed conversations about what works and how we do better, and to draw on the history of times when we didn’t get it so right. And so, to me, it’s what makes a great disciplinary approach to a case study – to be able to site it in the human, physical and historical landscape that it deserves to be.

Scaffolding Case Study: Teaching Synopticity in A Level Geography

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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!

Geographical Association Conference 2024 – Some Reflections

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It’s been a while since the Conference, and I’ve been on some annual leave and playing catch up with work afterwards. But I thought I’d share some reflections and learning – and now that the session downloads are starting to come through, I’ve got time to explore some of the sessions I didn’t get to.

First, congratulations to the whole team – from President to Chief Exec and all at HQ. I think it was a pretty packed conference, and it was delivered smoothly. There were a lot of amazing sessions and speakers, and I felt that most of the timetable blocks had four or five people that I could have easily gone to see or hear. Making decisions was hard – the pathways were nice, but there’s so much going on that it’s easy to feel like you’re missing out, even when you’re there!

It felt like there were some emerging themes across a number of sessions: the concepts of power, representation and ‘whose Geography’ have now firmly established themselves at the heart of the conference conversation. It also felt like there were a lot of conversations about sustainability – embedding the curriculum, the actions and the attitudes in to schools beyond just the geography classrooms; and there were also powerful themes of inclusion in terms of literacy (oracy, perhaps, next year?) and supporting EAL learners, as well as inclusion for the financial context of many schools and learners. I’m fascinated by the dynamic of what appears at Conference – and whether it drives the conversations in schools, or is driven by it and the wider circumstances. Clearly, there’s elements of both – a dialogue between Conference and the rest of the community and wider school geography.

There was a lot to love about the venue and the conference delivery, although there’s always considerate reflections (e.g. from Salaam Geographia) on how we can include more people, and make our spaces and community more diverse and inclusive. There are definitely better and more expert voices to listen to on how we improve our attendance and inclusivity of the whole community (perhaps even above and beyond the GA’s membership!), but one of the key elements that I’d reflect on is the discussion of cost. Clearly, the rail strike didn’t help anyone’s travel to and from Conference – though I guess Alanis would be proud at how many conversations happened about transport at a Geography event. But ticket prices are high, and travel and hotels put the conference out of reach for a significant proportion of teachers – particularly in a world where neither schools nor universities are likely to be subsidising professional development in the way they perhaps used to! I’m lucky to be able to come to conference – but how do we work together to make sure that everyone can, who wants to?

Learning Highlights:

For me, conference is always a space where I get to learn lots about things from expert practitioners. This year, I was really keen to learn more about literacy and supporting students in the classroom – and was delighted to be able to hear from real experts!

Emily Chandler’s (@ChandlerGeog) work is something we’ve already incorporated in to our training programme, but her talk this year on using a range of texts in the classroom will be incorporated in to our training as soon as I can make the edits. The need to look at reading as a fundamental driver of success in assessment (GL Reports, 2020), as well as the beating heart of the lesson was a really powerful message. As well as learning from other practice (e.g. Scaffolded Reading Experiences (Graves & Graves, 2003) drawn from English pedagogies), Emily’s session was also an awesome reminder of the *use* of texts to create, inspire or reimagine geographical worlds, rather than simply to read and download information.

As a bit of an old cynic about some of the hype around generative AI and tools in education (are they cool? Yes. Are they as smart as they claim? No. Are they going to revolutionise everything? Probably not… see interactive whiteboards), the modelled use of ChatGPT and specific tools to support literacy accessibility was actually really impressive. I’ll be taking away Diffit (https://web.diffit.me/) and Wordsift (https://wordsift.org/) as tools to scale up and down text for different reading ages, and to simply and powerfully create resources that serve the learners’ needs and development of the vocabulary and structures of learning! So thank you, Emily – not just for the demo of tools, but also the reminder to challenge my own cynicism at times!

Briley Habib (@Map_Addict) & Bethany Aldridge (@msaldrgeog) followed that up with another  masterclass on supporting EAL learners in the classroom, that’s also going to be incorporated in to our training programme as quickly as I can edit it! I loved the practical examples and work, balanced against the academic and researched rigour – delighted to learn more to support some of the techniques and ideas that Emily’s session had raised earlier. The worked examples showed the full effect of breaking the link between reading comprehension and success Ricketts et al. (2014) and the balances of cognitive science thinking needed in a Cummins’ Quadrants & Matrix.

Presenting Highlights:

Although a number of expert colleagues from phase committees and special interest groups were leading sessions, my presenter involvement was relatively limited this year. I was delighted that a number of my Teach First colleagues were able to lead sessions at conference, and I’m delighted to see Jessica and Helen’s expert thinking on supporting non-specialists and Stefan’s discussion of how we support and encourage Geography candidates for university on Friday. Well earned dinner on the Friday night for the presentation team, and it’s always great to talk to colleagues about what we’re doing in Teach First’s training programme and how we can learn from others.

Rather unusually, my highlight of Conference was being hugely proud (and a tiny bit of tech support) for my wife, Marianne, who spoke as an expert in the offshore wind sector. Although I’m sort of used to hearing some explanations at home, after a day of hybrid working, to see her expertise and knowledge in a lecture theatre in a geography conference was a really unexpected Saturday experience. I think it encapsulated the Presidential theme for the year beautifully: there’s so much geography in other spaces, if only we can connect with the people doing it to see inside their worlds. Thankfully, she was willing to come and volunteer at this event – we couldn’t have afforded to pay her normal speakers’ fees and charge-out rates!

Conference is a brilliant event to bring friends together, and renew one’s love for geography and the community – but I’d love to support and see that bring more people in every year. We’re a big tent of ideas, perspectives and approaches – and the more people and experience we hear from and share, the better our community is.

I take that mission as part of how we approach our training programme too – and so if we connected at conference, or if you think you’d like to work with us, or find out more about what we’re doing in Teach First Geography, then please do get in touch with me! Look forward to seeing you next year!