Photo Credit:  OllieBray (shows the SAGT poster for Curriculum for Excellence)

ACfE seems to be taking some flak from major players in the educational world. Chris Woodhead, writing under the headline, Curriculum for Ignorance, in today’s Sunday Times lambasts what he sees as its lack of rigour and content, and attacks the emphasis on process as opposed to knowledge.

Lindsay Paterson, professor of educational policy at Edinburgh University has warned that, unless teachers’ subject knowledge improved, it would be difficult to deliver the new curriculum effectively or raise the attainment of Scottish pupils.

The “fashionable orthodoxy” of ACfE ignored the need for direct teaching, he argued, and focused instead on “the kind of applied inter-disciplinary project work which is supposed to displace the need for expertise”. While inter-disciplinary work had its place, it made no sense unless the disciplines had been grasped first. Pupils could not grasp these fundamentals if the “didacticism of the expert” was not available, and that depended on the teacher having the necessary disciplinary grasp, he said at a Directors Conference.

Is his, and Chris Woodhead’s, analysis wrong? Is there a ring of truth in what they are saying, or are they creating an Aunt Sally, a fictional travesty of ACfE which they can then knock down with impunity? Is there indeed a lack of subject knowledge, and a lack of passion?

Reading their articles, though, I find myself asking some questions on ACfE-and better experts than me are asking plenty, too.

I am less interestd in the global philosophy of ACfE than in how it works in individual schools. We need to look at certain types of pupils and ask how ACfE will work for them. For example what type of curriculum is best suited for a pupil who aims to study for a top course (say Law, Medicine, etc) and is likely to do five Highers and say 3 AHs over S5 and S6. What exams will he or she sit in the near future, and in what way will they be different from exams sat this year? What is the best way to design a curriculum and make up a timetable that supports ACfE?

And wider points arise: What is the SQA doing about ACfE? (We get an idea from their website-   http://www.sqa.org.uk/sqa/34714.html and the report http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2009/02/23130007/0 What do universities think? How can there be “excellence” when schools can’t, because of funding cuts, offer a full range of AH courses? Which schools will become centres of excellence for the Scot Bac, and which will not be able to offer it?

Indeed, can there be excellence when so many pupils leave with poor qualifications, literacy rates and numeracy rates? What are those countries in Europe who are ahead of us in such league tables doing differently? do they have similar models?

The BBC published this simple graphic today. An article on a forthcoming climb up Kilimanjaro for Comic Relief by celebrities included a very effective comparison between Everest, Kilimanjaro and Ben Nevis.

Some fruitful questions:

• How are mountains formed?
• Why are some mountains higher than others?
• Why is it cooler at the top of a mountain when it is “nearer” the sun?

Scribd is a document sharing site,which according to its own statistics, houses 2 million documents. It was established in 2007.

I have used Scrib to upload a Word document I used for my First Year class, to show an organisation chart on physical geography.

Photo credit; Flickr,  piru22_jp

“What do you want?

“Information

“You won’t get it

This memorable piece of interrogation was part of the opening credits of The Prisoner, cult TV series of the 60s, whose start Patrick McGooghan died last week.
We all want information. We all use IT. We listen to CDs and watch the TV and DVDs. We send and receive inumerable bits of information each and every day. Wev text and e-mail obsessively. But what is information?

Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, in The Mathematical Theory of Communication discuss the idea of communication and information. Information, for them, is any message,  measured in bits and transmitted from one source and received by another. Between transmission and reception there can be noise, things added to a signal that were not intended-sound, static, distortions of image or, indeed errors in tranmission. I was struck by their point that information is not to be confused with meaning. Meaning implies some underlying structure to the information, perhaps a pattern, or a trend, a set of rules. Meaning may require the information to be analysed, compared, decoded or deconstructed. Units of information need to edited and filtered, and background noise eliminated. It is the teacher’s job to lead a pupil or a class into making meaningful sense of information.

They also stress a very significant concept; that the information content of a message is related to its suprise value, in other words, if the recipient already knows most of what is being said/texted/e-mailed, then the information content is slight. If the message contains information new to the recipient then there is a much greater surprise element. In lofty terms, that surprise may represent an epiphany or moment of revelation when an idea takes root in a mind, and the point is  grasped

Surely good teaching should examine this concept of surprise; a lesson where no new information was imparted would be redundant, or at any rate stale, but equally one where there was information overload could be overwhelming. Effective teaching should involve timing the release of information; enough to challenge, excite and inspire, while allowing time for consolidation, revision and reflection.

Glasgow Harbour, October 07

Resources: Summary Booklet, S1&2 Geography, acess to laptops (Plan A) or to digital projector (Plan B)

Aim: To recognise and describe the characteristics of Glasgow’s land use zones;

        to develop familiarity with Geograph as tool for searching for geographical images.

Background We have learned that Glasgow has four main land use zones:#

1. Central Business District

2 Inner City

3. Inner Suburbs

4. Outer Suburbs

We have made a land use map that shows the location of land use zones in Glasgow. This map should be pasted into your jotter.

Purpose: What we want to do is to LINK your map with some images of Glasgow.

Exposition: You are going to compare the descriptions of land use on pages 6 and 7 of your Summary Booklet with a selection of photographs on the photoshare website Geograph.

Tasks

Bring up Geograph home page. It should say “Welcome to Geograph”

In your jotter, put the heading Geograph exercise

Have your summary booklet open at page 6.

1. Copy out the definition of Geograph

2. Put the sub-heading, Geograph images of Grid Squares in Glasgow

Now click on this link here to get a map of Glasgow.

You will see that each grid square on the map has a small purple circle; Click on the map to bring up more details about that particular grid square.

Spend some time getting used to this feature-click on various squares around Glasgow. You will see that some have more photos than others. Notice that every grid square in Glasgow starts with the 2 letter code NS.

Now select two photos that you feel BEST represent the features of each of Glasgow’s four land use zones, ie two for the CBD, two for the outer suburbs, etc-8 in total.

Write out your results as follows:

Zone: CBD

1 Grid Square: NS____  <Title> by <photographer>

Featuresof the CBD that are shown in this photograph are …………………………………………

Repeat this for the other 7 photographs.

3 Are you a dyslexic

Photo credit: Flickr; David Flisher

I want to look at my provision for pupils with dyslexia. Geography is a multi sensory kind of subject, with a strong emphasis on the visual. I rely a lot on the digital projector to depict images and to show power points. I try to avoid using the board too much, but I feel I could use it more effectively when I do; I admire the neat layout and handwriting of certain colleagues. There is a lot of good advice for teaching geography to dyslexic pupils, and I am particularly keen on exploring how this blog can help. For example, I have set up a word bank for each topic, and have started to embed PowerPoints using slide share. I think this is something that could be developed. I also want to consider how we could use podcasts as a way of helping revise topics. I also think I need to take each page of text book and each worksheet and produce an alternative, dyslexia-friendly version. Among the key works of reference is the HMIe’s latest report, Education for Learners with Dyslexia. This contains some excellent, practical examples of best practice for dealing with dyslexia in the classroom.

Photo Credit-Flickr:  Oberazzi

Have been reading “Formative Assessment in the Secondary Classroom” by Shirley Clarke. I like her use of practical examples, and was particularly interested in the section on questioning. She reproduces a page by science teacher Dave Tuffin, who presents a series of “before” and “after” questions, designed to show how, with practice, we can reframe many questions to elicit a better response, and to encourage pupils to think more deeply. Mostly the questions go from the recall type (eg give a list, provide a word) to ones which require some thought. Among the strategies Tuffin uses are:

• Provide supporting vocabulary
  ask a question to be answered from the opposite standpoint;
  set up an hypothesis to be debated/challenged.

Dictionary Definition

Originally uploaded by luv4sams

This is the title of a regular column in the popular monthy magazine, Readers Digest. (a digest here means a summary of the main points) Each month they introduce the reader some new words and their meanings, with a view to enriching our vocabulary-ie increase your word power.

In geography we want to increase your word power. Geography is the description of place and there fore we can use lots of adjectives to paint a full, detailed and interesting picture of different parts of the world-maybe a city, a mountain, a river or a rain Forest.

Throughout the session, we shall be introducing many new words and terms. The first time you meet a new word, you will highlight it in your jotter, and you’ll add its definition. All new words will also go in a separate page of this blog called the Word Bank. As the session proceeds, you will see more words go into the word bank. You can find this page by going to the right hand pane of the blog, look for the heading “pages” and click on “Word Bank”.

Sir, what are we doing today?

This seems the most important question a pupil should ask. If you don’t know why you are in a class, and most importantly what it is you are meant to be learning or doing, then there is not much point in being there. It always helps to know what we are going to be learning.

One general approach we can apply to every lesson in geography is to think 5 Ws. This is a list of 5 questions, all beginning with W  we should be asking about any place we study.

Where is this place?

What is it like?

What makes it the same as/different from my home area?

Who lives here?

Why is this place the way it is?

We don’t always need to ask all 5 questions, and there are others we ask instead, but this is a useful starting point, and most importantly gets us thinking about the idea of place.

Next-building a geographical vocabulary: what words can we use to describe places.

The “Craft of the Classroom” focused on effective classroom management, with practical advice on the ways in which a teacher can establish control as a necessary precursor to building relationships, becoming “more friendly, more subtle, and more yourself”. I am going to get hold of the latest edition and re read Marland’s words of encouragement and practical suggestions, which I first read way back in 1983; it’s always instructive to revisit your roots, and weed out bad habits……

I love his pithy use of English; to define the central aim of a school as,

 “..sensitive, warm, efficient, human, realistic and thorough”

and the ideal mix for a teacher was a cocktail – “a spirit compounded of the salesman, the music-hall performer, the parent, the clown, the intellectual, the lover and the organiser”

Not an easy cocktail to distill for HGIOS3, perhaps, but Marland’s insight offers a refreshing vademecum for today’s teacher!