David Rogers

I haven’t headed to Bett’s TeachMeet for a couple of years, and it was great t head over after a day at the Royal Geographical Society .  After locating some Post-It notes and acquiring an epic new staffrm T-Shirt I was called up on to the stage, a little caught off guard!  Anyway, the talk was based around something that I’ve done for quite some time now, and spoke about at the Google Teacher Academy back in October 2014.  The idea and approach attempts to develop children’s critical thinking, especially in terms of accepting what’s online.  Furthermore, there’s I’ve tried to tackle this issue that many children have of not being about to safely provide feedback to peers. Here’s the presentation, explanation is below: I illustrated the principle by starting with the Iceland topic, which sits within the Amazing Places Scheme of work.  I meant to read the following extract, from Meltwater written by Michael Ridpath,  describing a volcano: The cloud th...

Closing time Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end. This is the first in a short series of posts around my successful appointment as an Assistant Headteacher at Patcham High School .  The job starts in September.  This post shares a lesson idea that would be worth a polish and revisit for any context.  I’m sharing these things here mainly for me to reflect upon and revisit at a later date, but also as others may benefit from the experience. The brief was to create a 25 minute lesson around the word ‘INSPIRE’ which forms the school’s mission statement.  The interpretation was open and I wanted to avoid being explicitly geography  linked.  Now, it’s impossible to develop a fully formed lesson in that time with a class that I haven’t met. It’s also not possible to teach an Outstanding lesson to such a group of young people, not least because I hadn’t marked their books.  With this in mind, I wanted to take a risk and show th...

Being able to answer case study questions correctly is vital if students are to succeed at GCSE.   This is a description of a simple idea that worked with a Year 10 group studying an LEDC foreign aid case study, in this case Goat Aid.  The OCR B Geography examination demands that three, well developed points are made about a relevant case study that includes place specific detail.  This lesson required: Some background information on Goat Aid, provided by a text book; iPads and students’ own devices in order to check / expand information; 9 blank A3 pieces of paper per pair; whatever they could find in the room, including textbooks and pens etc; some stickers; an examination question.   The lesson began with a Feedback 5 activity that allowed the class to focus on setting their own targets.  As a group, a particular weakness was the lack of specific detail within answers.  Another area that needed development was the wa...

Not long finished delivering the textbooks workshop. Seemed to go down well. The main thrust was that textbooks are not the creation of all evil. Rather, especially if learners are to develop into creative independent thinkers, we need to use textbooks in new ways. Creative use of textbooks can improve pupils' media literacy and make life a little bit easier for teachers. Textbooks Everyones Guilty Pleasure Workshop View more presentations from geogrocks .