Geography

Curriculum Intent

• Inclusive department that ensures all students will make strong progress in geography.
• To help students to understand the awe and wonder of geography and have a fascination/passion for the subject.
• To help students to see the interconnectedness and geography in everyday life and how we are all affected by geography.
• To give students experience of high quality fieldwork to see how scientific studies are completed and understand what topics you can investigate.
• To foster critical evaluative thinkers that can grapple with problems and think deeply around the topics that we teach in geography.
• To improve their metacognition skills through Revision for learning tasks to help prepare and strengthen their long term memory so they know more and remember more.
• To improve their written academic language skills and help them to become effective writers.
• To understand how human and physical geography is interlinked.
• Improvement is our goal and we believe in marginal gains making a difference to students’ progress.

Curriculum Implementation

• Challenge is embedded within all lessons and is highlighted to students using #challenge
• High expectations and aspirational targets in geography, there are no ceilings for students in our subjects and we are proud that students quite often beat their benchmarks in the subject.
• Inclusive subject that uses differentiation and adapted teaching to help all to progress.
• We are teaching them to apply their knowledge to the questions.
• Enriching fieldwork to locations like Milford-on-sea, Lyndhurst, Oxford, and Iceland tour in May half term for yr10 students.
• We promote wider reading from yr7 to yr13 through wider reading worksheets in our booklets to help encourage reading around the subject and to help improve their academic literacy in their answers.
• Intervention lessons fit into the curriculum by allowing us to work in smaller groups to practice metacognition skills like RfL techniques and helping students to see the link between effort and attainment.  We also use the lessons to practice examination technique by using past papers to complete walkthroughs with their teacher so they know how to answer certain types of questions confidently.
• Homework will be used to help strengthen Reading, Recall, Research and Revision in geography.  We aim to have 80% of our h/ws working towards the 4 Rs.
• Students will understand the sequence of learning that they are undertaken and have some appreciation as to where this fits into the overall picture throughout the 2, 5 or 7 year period that they study geography.
• We aim to improve students as reflective practioners by getting them to complete a self-reflection review before and after each module to help them to see the progress that they have made in the lessons.  Also to help them to see what they still might need to work on, if there are any weaknesses still from that module.
• We also get students to reflect on their performance after each assessment week or PPE or Prelims so that they can make small improvements to how they prepare for the exams.  Getting students to write down how many marks off the next grade has proved effective at getting them to see how close the grade boundaries are and that lots of small improvements over time can add up to a lot.
• We use booklets per module for every year group and every module through yr7-13.  We firmly believe that these worksheets help to extend, challenge and progress students’ knowledge and understanding at a very quick rate and allows us to get on with quality first teaching from minute 1 of a lesson.
• Assessment books are used for all assessment tasks and h/w tasks.