Using a Range of Texts in the Geography Classroom

Geography is the study of the world around us, including people, the places they live and the environment. On the Geographical Association‘s website they state that geography as a subject “speaks directly to young people’s curiosity, wonder and concern for the world”. There are many ways in which we can ignite this curiosity and wonder

Reading in the Geography Classroom – Why is it important?

Reading is an important skill for our students to develop and has many benefits to the geography classroom. The National Literacy Trust defines literacy as “the ability to read, write, speak and listen in a way that lets us communicate effectively and make sense of the world.” This definition alone highlights many of the reasons

Making Revision part of our Regular Teaching Practice

Effective revision is a key part of examination success, however, like with most skills, revision is something that needs to be taught and practiced. When students enter school they do not automatically know how to revise. Without our input, many students will attempt revision, however the approaches that they choose are unlikely to be the

RGS Young Geographer of the Year Theme 2023 – A Blueprint for the Future

The theme for this year’s Young Geographer of the Year competition is ‘a blueprint for the future’. This is an excellent theme with so much potential for the students to consider and come up with innovative solutions to the problems that the world experiences. Many of the challenges facing our world today are linked to

The Potential for Collaboration Between Geography and Psychology

Collaboration between subjects can have many benefits, both for teachers and students. For teachers, collaborating with other subjects can save us time, for example through sharing resources or providing specialist knowledge. It also enables us to apply skills and knowledge from other subjects, which can help students to become more confident at applying knowledge that

Reflecting on Learning: Embedding metacognition in the classroom

Metacognition links to a students awareness of their own thinking and is often described as ‘thinking about thinking’. Research by both the EEF and the IB found that metacognition was one of the most effective ways to help students to progress and to raise academic performance. There are four main areas where I use metacognition

Aphantasia: What impact can not being able to picture something in your head have on learning in Geography?

Think of a waterfall. What can you see? If we collected responses to that question, you are likely to find that there is a significant variation between everyone’s experience of the task. Some people may have been thinking about a specific waterfall, maybe one that you have visited, one you teach about or just one

Developing Writing Skills in Geography

Freya (@Engteacherabro2) gave a fantastic talk about academic writing at the TeachMeet International Icons event a few weeks ago (the recording of the whole event is available here and definitely worth a listen). This made me think more about writing in Geography and what we can do to support students with this in our subject.

Helping students apply knowledge from other subjects

There is a substantial crossover in knowledge and skills between subjects, however students often struggle to be able to apply this knowledge in different contexts. For example, despite knowing that students have learned about PEEL paragraphs in History, they may not apply this to extended writing in Geography. Why does this happen? Research has shown

What happens when the words we teach have different meanings in other subjects?

Tier two vocabulary appears frequently across all school subjects and consequently a knowledge of these words is essential for students to be able to fully access our lessons, reading and examinations (more on this in my previous post). With over 7000 tier two words, identifying which words to teach can be challenging. This challenge is