Despite optionality this year, the AQA course is lengthy. If you are doing it over 2 years, it needs to be covered at the rate of knots and so therefore retrieval practice (RP) should be a welcome guest in every classroom! Put simply, RP is the strategy of calling information to mind which enhances and […]
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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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As we enter the final stages of covering the A Level Geography content, I seem to be giving the same feedback to our cohort with each completed essay they hand in. Thus, some creativity in approach is required and I’ve started to experiment with different methods of structuring and scaffolding A Level essay writing. In […]
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“Fieldwork makes geography come to life, puts everything into context in glorious 3D and helps students really grasp how geography literally shapes the world around us.” Kate Humble, BBC Springwatch presenter (taken from Parkinson, 2009) It doesn’t take long to persuade a geography teacher of the benefits of fieldwork and even less time to encourage […]
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Like many schools, the majority of our geography department interventions occur in Year 11 with all hands on deck to ensure target grades are met and significant progress has been made (and can be shown!). As part of my role as Head of Department, I am seeking ways to try to avoid this mad rush […]
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Planning and teaching the new GCSE (Eduqas A at my school) has highlighted the importance of the AO3 objective: ‘apply knowledge and understanding to interpret, analyse and evaluate geographical information and issues and to make judgements’. My Year 10 students have been developing their AO3 skills but many have struggled to include everything required in […]
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You’ve just invested in new resources for the 2016 GCSE and A Level specifications. Now what? Head of Geography Kate Stockings suggests some ways to get the most out of your textbooks. Nationwide, geography departments seem to be in similar positions: a pile of new textbooks (hard-fought to get!), a crazy amount of content to […]
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I am very lucky to work in a girls’ school where the students are extremely focused and conscientious. Many are not satisfied unless they have a page full of detailed, multi-coloured notes at the end of every lesson. Therefore, when I invited my Year 11 class into the classroom and asked them to put away […]
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Extended writing is becoming more important at GCSE where the new specifications are demanding students to think at a higher level and to structure their written answers. As a result, I have been trying some techniques with my current Year 10 students that I hope to integrate into our new GCSE schemes of work. Explode […]
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