We are Geographers!
Geographers are types of scientists who study the Earth; this includes the land (the physical features) and the people who live within it (the human features).
Mawnan School is principally a place for high quality learning. To facilitate this, we continuously strive to do better for the children in our care so that learning is constantly deepened and the experience improved. We are always striving to try new things, to seek to learn from those experiences, and work to adopt and embed the practices that work best.
Our vision is that Geography, is no different to any subject that we teach – we want to deliver the best possible curriculum we can. We want to be experts so that we can deliver with the expertise that the subject deserves - the expertise that our pupils deserve.
Our vision is to deliver a high-quality geography curriculum that inspires a curiosity and fascination about the world and the people who live within it. Our ambition is to instil wonder around diverse places and people and the natural and human environments of the world we share.
What is our Intent?
The goal of Geography is nothing less than an understanding of the vast interacting system comprising all humanity and its natural environment on the surface of the Earth. (Ackerman, 1963)
Geography is the study of the earth as a home to humankind. (Johnston, 1985)
At Mawnan School, studying Geography is important as it provides us with knowledge of our planet that has helped shape our history and will continue to shape our lives in the future. It is a link with physical and social sciences, helping us to make informed decisions for both our planet and its inhabitants, viewed from different perspectives. Geographers develop their knowledge of places and environments, as well as their understanding of the diversity of different societies and cultures. This helps them to become responsible global citizens who understand how people and environments interact. If you watch or read the news, you will find that the most important issues facing the world are geography-related, so by studying geography we are learning about issues that will actually affect our own lives.
In Geography we seek to set suitable learning challenges and respond to children’s diverse learning needs through engagement and stimulation of their curiosity and imaginations. We strive to promote a variety of geography skills which support the development of knowledge through studying places and themes. We also focus on skills and our 9 core concepts through enriched cultural capital (the essential knowledge that children need to be educated citizens) and the provision of an ambitious body of procedural and semantic knowledge to develop changes in long term memory (learning). Students learn most effectively through a variety of media, including aural, visual and written and that, therefore, the teaching staff employ a broad range of teaching strategies.
We encourage children to learn by experience and we value fieldwork as an integral part of the Geography Curriculum, and the “Cultural Capital” that it adds to their lives.
We believe children learn best by having opportunities to revisit previous learning and so have created a well mapped learning journey that gives our pupils the opportunity to embed their understanding into long term memory. Therefore, we teach geography in half termly Expeditions, allowing children to build on their previous knowledge so that the children can fully immerse themselves and have opportunities to reflect and build on prior learning.
Our Journey Roadmaps allow each class to develop their prior learning from the previous year. All teachers have been an integral part of creating these Roadmaps which show how Mawnan School will be covering and enriching the national curriculum to ensure deeper understanding for all. In EYFS and KS1 (mixed age classes) the Roadmap is on a 2 year rolling programme, in Year 3- 5 (mixed age classes) the Roadmap is on a 3 year rolling programme and in Year 6 there is an annual Roadmap.
By visiting each of the Class sections of the website http://mawnanschool.com/web/our_classes , you will be given the opportunity to see an Overview document. This will show you the key focuses and questions for each half term. Each teacher uses the full version of this document to create a long term plan for the Expedition. These contain all the information we would require to ensure that our curriculum is as succinct as possible: Intent, Linked Class Text, Cultural Capital, Vocabulary, Skills, Key Concepts, Prior Learning, National Curriculum Coverage and New Learning Focuses.
How do we ensure continuous development?
The teachers at Mawnan have focused on what would need to be put in place to ensure that a Geography curriculum can be implemented to a standard that we would want for our pupils. As with every subject, we looked at three actions each year: one for the staff based on a Menti questionnaire; one obtained and guided by pupil voice based on a pupil Google Form; and one based on external research e.g. Ofsted review.
Examples of the teacher questionnaires that have informed our CPD:
Through ensuring high standards of teaching and learning in geography, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school. Geography is taught as part of a half-termly Expeditions, focusing on knowledge and skills stated in the National Curriculum. On re-designing our curriculum, teachers worked in collaboration to ensure knowledge and skills were explicitly and progressively built into sequences of lessons. Staff meeting time is also used effectively, to gather evidence, ensure progression and make adjustments where necessary to enhance pupil engagement. It is important to us that key concepts are considered as a thread that weaves through our curriculum and allows the pupils the opportunity to make links between each Geography Expedition and the wider world.
Nine key concepts of geography repeat throughout the curriculum. (In brackets, you will see other important related concepts that are planned into Expeditions and are implicitly referred to.) These provide lenses through which to consider the different aspects of geography:
boundaries (continents, localities, region, nations)
cartography (atlases, directions, distance, Equator, latitude, longitude, North/South Pole, maps, scale, symbols)
change (adaptation, sustainability, development)
climate (climate change, climate zones, pollution, weather, atmosphere)
economy (trade, sustainability)
environment (fertile, diversity, vegetation, climate, habitat, ecosystem, sustainability)
movement (migration, navigation, transport)
physical geography (biomes, bodies of water, tectonics, topography, landform, terrain, vegetation)
resources (energy, food supply, infrastructure)
settlements (population, rural areas, urban areas, development)
In EYFS our teachers are adept at helping pupils to understand their locality, the wider world and observable phenomena, such as the weather and seasons. Pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities are fully included in the provision for geography.
From EYFS to KS2, we recognise the importance for children to gain ‘real-life’ experiences through hands-on, practical activities. We ensure this through fieldwork and educational visits. We supplement this by using maps, atlases, globes and digital mapping, using locational and directional language, using aerial photographs, devising maps and using Ordnance Survey maps.
In KS2, carefully chosen, high quality, age-appropriate whole class texts are a big part of our curriculum. Where possible these add an extra geographical context to the children’s learning and emersion in the subject.
The pupils also have access to a fiction section in the library that will take them all around the world, but particularly to the places they have visited in our lessons.
Each classroom has invested in sets of some of the most awe-inspiring fiction and non-fiction books that the pupils will draw upon during their learning.
Examples of these can be found in our Reading Roadmaps:
What do our lessons look like?
Content and subject pedagogical knowledge – you would see highly skilled teachers with a good understanding of geography pedagogy teaching engaging lessons.
Meaningful contexts - children learning by being challenged in a series of well-designed geographical enquiry tasks linked to meaningful contexts. Many lessons will have an opportunity to review prior learning and implicitly build links between lessons and across the years.
Teachers supporting – by guiding children to raise questions and design enquiries to find the answers to geographical questions or hypothesis. Teachers supporting children to work and think like a geographer. Teaching modelling and supporting children to develop geographical enquiry skills.
What do our ‘Knowledge and Understanding of the World’ books look like?
Our lessons, and therefore our books, are led by questions and enquiry. The key aim of our books is the creation of a knowledge resource to reference from and we aim to get the pupils to use them in this way. As knowledge is being built up in the books, there will be opportunities to show understanding through improved writing opportunities (Literacy being taught through the geographical context) and independent writing tasks e.g. setting writing, speeches, fact files, explanations.
How do we measure the impact of our curriculum?
Assessment is ongoing and most lessons will begin with a recap quiz, may have quizzes throughout a lesson and will have an end of block quiz. Evaluation of both knowledge and skills will be done through a mixture of planned interleaved tasks such as independent writing, research tasks, evaluative tasks and pupil interview. The main aim of any assessment will be to measure the positive impacts that the Mawnan Curriculum has had on our pupils.
This formative assessment is then used to inform the recap opportunities that we have in the Summer Term where one week is set aside for each Expedition from the year.
The impact and measure of this is to ensure that children are equipped with geographical knowledge, geography concepts and geography skills, which will enable them to be reflective learners who seek to make links between the Mawnan Curriculum’s and the world around them. Through doing this, we aim to ignite an excitement for geography enquiry, to encourage the children to become lifelong learners in the wider world. We hope that the importance placed on our human and physical Geography curriculum, along with the thrill of learning and expert teaching, will help them to make sense of the world around them and pique their curiosity in places and people.
The future of Geography at Mawnan:
Actions:
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To develop teachers as ‘experts’ by modelling skills and teaching with geographical concepts in mind. (Use of substantive knowledge) |
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To improve their view of themselves as geographers through improved use of geographical language during Oracy sessions in Geography lessons, improved understanding of geography skills and consistent use of their topic books as a point of reference. |
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https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/research-review-series-geography Ensure that our teaching and curriculum reflect that we believe that Geographical expertise is built on substantive geographical knowledge: locational knowledge place knowledge and understanding knowledge of environmental, physical and human geography processes geographical skills
Ensure that we are drawing from the breadth of concepts that gives pupils the knowledge they need to appreciate the whole domain of geography. Demonstrate how common concepts draw different aspects of the subject together. |