Encouraging Enquiry for Controlled Assessment

A little while back the department developed the approach to geographical enquiry below:

After discussion, it became clear that pupils struggled with the first stage of enquiry: Asking questions. At GCSE in trail Controlled Assessments, it was clear that if the questions were poorly defined, then the subsequent data collection, presentation, analysis and conclusion would suffer.

Introduce some random objects.

We noticed that quite often young people are expected to be creative without any form of warm up. We introduce the objects and then ask the class to develop a range of geographical questions linked to that object. Take the coat hanger for instance:

Why is this coat hanger made in China?
Where is China?
Who made this hanger?
Where are my clothes made?
How could this hanger be reused?
Is G-Star a globalised brand?
Do G-Start use sweatshops?

This activity can be carried out with any object.

Comments

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David Rogers

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