Geography

The study of geography is about more than just memorising places on a map. It’s about understanding the complexity of the world; appreciating the diversity of cultures that exists across continents and, in the end, it’s about using all that knowledge to help bridge divides and bring people together”

Barack Obama

Vision

The Geography Department encourages students to be curious and enthusiastic about the ever-changing world we live in. Students extend their knowledge of human and physical processes that shape the world we live in today by studying a broad range of interesting and stimulating topics.

Curriculum Intent

‘Geography is the subject that holds the key to the future’.

Within geography, we strive to create a supportive and collaborative ethos for learning by providing investigative and enquiry-based learning opportunities to encourage deeper thinking, deeper learning and deeper discussions. The curriculum will enable our students to be confident to understand and ask questions about the world at local, national and global levels.

Our curriculum encourages to students to learn about places that are outside of their own experiences and develop their understanding of the world’s diversity of environments, peoples, cultures, and develop a global ‘open mind’ so that they can challenge stereotypes and understand key ideas and concepts.

We aim to develop a holistic knowledge of the subject and throughout their learning journey develop skills that are transferrable across all subjects in order to create a platform for students to build on in the future.

Curriculum – The geography curriculum is structured into units for each year group. Each unit builds upon learning from the previous units and has been designed so that links between concepts can be made. Units are designed to ensure that pupils have time to deepen their understanding as well as make connections across the different areas of learning.

Pedagogical approach – The department is currently on a journey to embedding a deep learning approach in geography. We strongly believe this will help us to deliver our geography intent and raise attainment and enjoyment of geography learning throughout the school. To support teaching on current geographical issues we collaborate with the Geographical association (GA) to ensure the curriculum is up-to-date and facilitated by a recognised geographical body.

Literacy approach- Literacy is at the forefront of our curriculum. We embed a variety of creative extended writing opportunities through the ‘Big Write’ tasks, for e.g. When studying the topic on Climate change, they write a letter to the Prime minister discussing the impacts and climate change and possible solutions. Students will routinely be offered opportunities to work in pairs and groups to develop oracy skills. We develop student’s oracy skills through debates, discussions, and presentations and ‘No Pens’ Day. We encourage students to use a wide range of geographical vocabulary which is appropriate and accurate, and which develops and evolves throughout their journey in Geography.

Mathematical skills: we continue to collaborate with the Maths department to develop a variety of mathematical skills into students learning, and develop skills in geographical Information Systems (GIS) which allow for digital mapping, analysis of data and data models.

All lesson/series of lesson will contain the following:

1. Effective questioning that promotes discussion
2. Engaging tasks to promote deep thinking giving the students opportunities to explain and justify their opinions.
3. Some lessons and all assessments give students the skills to structure extended pieces of writing and the stamina to write for longer.

Classroom practices – In classrooms, there are many systems in place to support us in achieving our aims.

• All lessons will start with a ‘do now’ activity to promote discussion and geographical thinking
• All lesson intentions are constructed using higher order blooms taxonomy
• The majority of lessons will embed retrieval practice to activate prior knowledge that will be needed to access the lesson.
• Lessons encourage students to make synoptic links to develop their understanding of the topics and how they are interconnected, providing the bigger picture.
• Some lessons will provide the opportunity to participate in practical based learning activities, for example; model making or river drainage basins, coastal landforms, earthquake proof building designs, plate boundaries, and landscapes in a box.
• Where appropriate pictorial and video resources are used to support the learning

Problem solving tasks are carefully constructed to include links with other concepts from the geography curriculum

Curriculum Overview

Learning Journey

Geography Learning Journey