Exploring and Developing Strategies to Raise Standards in Year 10 GCSE Geography at Turnford
Exploring and developing strategies to raise standards in year 10 GCSE Geography at Turnford School, Hertfordshire
Emma Boughey
The professional concern
For a number of years, although gradually improving, the GCSE Geography results at Turnford School have been significantly below national average: The ‘Humanities’ section of Raise on Line is highlighted in blue and this has impacted on the whole school results. It has been my priority this year to develop and implement strategies with the year 10 Geography students to improve this situation and to allow them to achieve their full potential in their GCSE Geography examination in the summer of 2014.
The journey
I have grouped the strategies used into the following:
1. Evaluation and reflection on where we were at currently
2. Literacy in Geography
3. Encouraging students to become more independent learners
4. Building stronger foundations at KS3 for GCSE
Evaluation and reflection
I began by compiling a detailed, accurate picture of each unit from the current GCSE specification, highlighting current strengths and weaknesses, changes already implemented by our department and by EDEXCEL and the predicted impact that these should have. This gave me a clear starting point for my project.
Literacy in Geography
A key issue for our current GCSE cohort was that students were struggling to understand the demands of the exam questions. Taking this into consideration and working alongside Turnford’s literacy drive whole school, I developed a series of techniques to support students in independently unpicking exam questions and deciding what to include to successfully structure their responses. The most successful of these, as judged by student feedback and use in their exam responses, is the ‘BUG’ technique: Box the command word, Underline the key words, Go back over the question, which I adapted from an idea displayed at a TLDW network event in October 2012.
Furthermore following a collaboration with another Hertfordshire Head of Department I adapted a technique that she used with her students in which the common command words were taken from past exam papers and an assessment grid was created to show how students, with different target grades, would attempt each command word.
Encouraging students to become more independent learners
Hopkins (2012) discussed how ta simple strategy like giving students folders and dividers successfully encouraged them to take greater responsibility for their learning and organisational skills. I decided that this would be a good starting point to encourage my GCSE students to become more independent learners. This has been met with mixed reviews from students with the most able students appreciating them more than others in the group.
Along side this I produced an overview tracker sheet for students to set and monitor their own learning across their GCSE course. For each individual topic I created ‘need to know’ points so that students could self-assess their learning against these points supporting CUREE’s (2010) view that students should be in control and taking responsibility for their own learning. In addition I made the decision to give a large amount of my classroom display space over to my GCSE students to display their learning and reminders of the strategies I had developed to support them.
Building stronger foundations at KS3 for GCSE
It became clear after various consultation and collaboration opportunities that we could not significantly raise our attainment at GCSE and sustain this without re-viewing the KS3 curriculum and clearly embedding GCSE content and skills. I have therefore added topics into the KS3 curriculum e.g. earthquakes that are currently found in most GCSE exam specifications to give the students better foundations for their GCSE learning. Alongside this I have introduced progression maps (student friendly grade descriptors) in the same format as what we use at GCSE to ensure that students have consistency in their learning to smooth over the transition between KS3 and GCSE Geography. Furthermore, at Turnford, the year 9’s spend the last 5 weeks of the summer term in their options timetables. I have devised a skills based scheme of work for this time period this year so that we can ensure confidence in these skills from an early point in the GCSE course. The impact of this strategy will not be seen until we receive the next cohort of GCSE geographers but KS3 attainment this year shows good progress in comparison to previous years which is promising for our GCSE attainment.
Outcomes towards the end of the year
Frost (2010) is very accurate in saying that a task like this is a process, or a journey; there are no quick fixes. It is paramount that the students understand not only what they are learning but how they are learning and why this is important to them. The successes of my strategies detailed above have been due to the student involvement in trialling and evaluating the strategies around literacy and independence.
The students involved have a much clearer understanding of what is required of them in their exam responses and how to go about writing these successfully. Increasingly, over the year students have become more independent learners and use strategies like Claxton (2006) suggests e.g. the stuck wall, before looking to me for support in their learning.
Proposals and recommendations
As a result of undertaking this project I have recommended to SLT that at Turnford School, we need to develop a team of geography teachers to work collaboratively and share ideas as a department as well as trying to form more links with similar departments in our area because developing this project has highlighted the power of collaboration with each other.
If other subject areas or colleagues in other schools were to pursue similar goals to mine I would encourage them to spend the time, in the first instance, evaluating exactly where they are currently at and clear ways forward as a team before embarking on new strategies. Secondly, if colleagues were to adopt any of the strategies I have implemented I would encourage them to share with the students the potential benefits and intended impacts of the strategies and also involving them in the evaluation of the impacts on their learning.
If anyone would like to know more about this project I can be contacted on: and would be happy to discuss my project in further detail.
References
Claxton, G. (2006). Learning to Learn – The Fourth Generation: Making sense of Personalised Learning, Bristol: TLO.
CUREE (2010) adapted extract from Curee (2010) The Student Participation Anthology London: GTC England.
Frost, D. (2010). Teacher leadership and educational innovation. Serbian journal of the Institute for Educational Research.
Hopkins, K. (2012). Promoting independent learning through modelling organisational skills. Coventry,UK: Learning and Skills Improvement Service.