First impressions from Geography teachers of the new Education Inspection Framework (EIF) published by Ofsted in May 2019 are overwhelmingly positive. Let’s start with the fact that the new framework puts the focus of inspection on the school curriculum and specifically what is being taught in the classroom i.e. subjects – and in our case, […]
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By Gemma Bott At last the final half term of the year has arrived. The time of year when you can get caught up with all of those jobs you’ve been putting off or just not had time to do. For secondary school teachers, exam classes have left, hopefully leaving extra PPA time in the […]
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So, just like that, another exam season is over and the GCSE Geography exams of 2019 are completed. With this being the second cohort of Year 11s to sit the reformed Geography specifications, I think that many Geography teachers were intrigued to see another set of live papers – what would be tested this year? […]
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Andy Chandler-Grevatt Back to School. The end of the summer break and the new term. New students, new timetable, new you? What will you do differently this school year? An often neglected part of our ambitions, planning and targets is looking after ourselves. How are you going to look after yourself this year? Teachers are […]
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Professor Chris Kyriacou I have spent more than 30 years teaching about and doing research on what constitutes ‘effective’ teaching. Over the years I have become more and more convinced that the key to being a successful teacher, both in terms of the quality of learning you promote, and in terms of maintaining your own […]
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Everywhere you look in the education world currently, it seems that discussion is centred around the forthcoming new Ofsted Framework. For many (including myself), the framework is a welcome change – an opportunity to put the what and why back at the heart of our teaching discussions and decisions. With the framework clearly centred on […]
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In September, upon joining a new school (and thus a new department) I decided to give myself a target: to make sure that departmental meetings were meaningful, insightful and valued. In short, I wanted to ensure that our Geography departmental meetings were more than just a discussion of admin or a list of discussion points […]
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Exams are just around the corner, and your students are probably hard at work revising. We asked you to send us some of your top revision tips earlier this year – we loved them so much that we thought they’d be useful to share so that you can pass on to your students. Here are […]
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The dust has finally settled on the 2018 exams; students have received their results and the examiners have now published their reports. We’ve done the hard work for you and read up on where GCSE students succeeded this year, and where they needed some help, and gathered together some resources from Oxford that could help […]
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Over a year ago, in a previous post for this blog , I wrote about my focus of encouraging students of ALL ages to ‘Speak Like A Geographer’. This was in light of having previously restricted this focus on terminology to GCSE and A Level cohorts – and wondering why they didn’t manage to adjust to the required key words and […]
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