COP28 Teaching Activities: Three Carbon News Stories and How to Use Them
Three recent news stories about the carbon budget and climate have caught my eye. Spoiler-alert: one story features a Pacific 'island paradise'. All are useful hooks to promote students'...
Global Heating and the Unintended Consequences of Global Governance
Studying human interventions in the carbon cycle? Here’s an update you might have missed, as it was publicised in August. Scientists have discovered that we have been carrying out a massive...
Sycamore Gap: Place Imageability & Place Meaning
Yesterday the news broke of the loss of a 300-year old tree that stood on in the so-called Sycamore Gap on Hadrian’s Wall, apparently felled by vandals. I use the term ‘broke’ in part because I...
AQA A-Level Geography Paper 2 Topic Tracker 2023
UPDATED FOR 2023: This resource provides a detailed, topic-by-topic breakdown of how the Paper 2 Human Geography topics have been examined in the papers set so far for AQA A-Level...
AQA A-Level Geography Paper 1 Topic Tracker 2023
UPDATED FOR 2023: This free, downloadable resource provides a detailed, topic-by-topic breakdown of how the Paper 1 Physical Geography topics have been examined in papers set so far for AQA A-Level...
Geography Requires Improvement (although has improved significantly since the last report!)
Yesterday Ofsted published the long-awaited geography subject report - and there are lots of positives to take away - the main one being that geography teaching is in a much better state now, than...
UK Infrastructure Developments - Time for an Update!
Most of us teaching the AQA GCSE spec will agree that the UK section of Changing Economic World is a thorn in our sides and very tricky to make remotely engaging to students. And then you add in...
Space and Place - A-Level Changing Places
Having met my Year 12s for the first time last week we launched ourselves into the Changing Places unit of the specification. We have learned that a space is a place without meaning, whereas a...
Lessons to be learned from the summer's GCSE exams - Paper 3: Fieldwork
My final blog highlights the important takeaways from the fieldwork section of the examiner report. Each year this seems to be the part of the paper that teachers and students dread (completely...
Lessons to be learned from the summer's GCSE exams - Paper 3: Issue Evaluation (the pre-release)
In this blog I have highlighted the key points from the examiners report that you need to aware of when prepping students for this part of the exam next time. It is also worth pointing out that the...
Lessons to be learned from the summer's GCSE exams - Paper 2
Today I am moving on to look at Paper 2 - this examiner report is much shorter than the one for Paper 1, so it will be discussed in just one blog post. It is probably worth mentioning at the start...
Lessons to be learned from the summer's GCSE exams - Paper 1 analysis
In this blog I am going to highlight the key points from the Paper 1 examiner report for AQA GCSE Geography. Have a read of the previous post that summarises overall performance -...
Over the next week or so I am going to share a series of blogs that summarise key parts of the examiner reports. The examiners reports are a really useful tool to help inform your teaching, and in...
A-Level Geography Results Analysis 2023
Grading of students this summer was trailed as being similar to that of students in 2019, prior to the pandemic. In fact, across all subjects A results were up, from 7.7% to 8.9%, as were A-A...
Educational rationale: Decision making exercises are common in GCSE courses, notably AQA, and also included in some A Level courses too. It is a critical thinking skill held in high regard by...
With record-breaking temperatures across most of southern Europe, but downpour after downpour across the UK, lots of students may be questioning whether climate change is anything to be worried...
GIS for the NEA: A Quick Start Guide for the Confused!
For many teachers and students the NEA feels like a natural place to start using GIS. The ability to efficiently collect, present and analyse spatial data is of huge importance to a successful...
Geography News Quiz: 7th July 2023
Here's our final weekly 'Geography in the News' Quiz for this academic year.
Yes, it's National Fieldwork Fortnight, but for many departments a major obstacle when carrying out fieldwork is a lack of equipment, and in times of dwindling budgets buying fieldwork equipment...
Geography News Quiz: 30th June 2023
Here's this week's 'Geography in the News' Quiz.