LESSONS LEARNED ON LISTENING TO YOUR OWN ADVICE!

How many times have you given someone a great piece of advice but failed to act upon it yourself? This seems to be a common flaw amongst teachers, including myself.

Take for instance, if you’re not well. One of my responsibilities as Deputy Headteacher is staff welfare.  I have conversations with staff on a regular basis about their well-being and often find myself saying 'your health comes first'. When it comes to sending staff home who are not well enough to be in work, the conversation tends to go ‘but I need to teach my exam groups’. Whilst it’s admirable that we put the needs of our students first, we sometimes need to be kinder to ourselves. I found that out myself last week when I tried to force myself to work through a nasty migraine only to be sent home after a rather embarrassing turn in the canteen.

A big buzz word in education at the moment is resilience. As leaders and teachers, we often have to put on a brave face and just get on with things. However, I do wonder if that sometimes sends out the wrong message, especially when it comes to illness. If I force myself into school when I am clearly not well enough, am I sending a message to other staff that they should do the same?

Mental health is a big talking point in the profession at the moment and rightly so, but we should not lose sight of physical health. I wonder how many teachers have put off going to the doctors because they can’t get an after school appointment or simply can’t fit it into a busy week? Moreover, how many teachers have put their physical symptoms down to the job? Or indeed doctors? 

I have great admiration for those working in the medical profession. However, I would urge anyone who has any long term symptoms to follow them up. For years, I put agonising headaches down to stress. I repeatedly went to the doctors only to be told that my headaches were due to tension and that I should try and find ways to relax. Even when I pointed out a small lump on my forehead, I was told that it was the shape of my skull. I put off going back to the doctors for fear of being labeled a hypochondriac. It took a visit to a sports masseur to convince me to go back. She took one look at the lump on my head and said I needed to insist on having a scan. Turns out I had a tumor growing in my skull and needed surgery to have it removed. Fortunately, it was benign but it was certainly a reality check for me. As part of my surgery, I had a section of my skull removed and a metal plate inserted. As if that wasn’t bad enough, we had the Ofsted call three days before my op. If ever there was a time to say you need Ofsted like a hole in the head, it was then!

Back to not listening to my own advice. Three weeks after my surgery, I went back to work. Looking back, I really wasn’t ready. My school certainly didn’t put any pressure on me to go back but once again, the guilt at missing lessons with my exam groups kicked in. Even though I had a genuine reason for being off work, I found it hard not to worry about my growing workload and the extra pressure I was putting on my colleagues.

So what lessons have I learned?

Health has to come first. My sister who is also a teacher was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 32. She too was told that her tiredness was most likely down to work and nearly didn’t go back for a second checkup.

    Listen to your body.

    Don’t put off medical appointments and   that includes the embarrassing ones!
   
      Don’t try to be a hero!

Lessons learned teaching the new spec Geography GCSE

Faced with a new specification and grading system, I really had no clue how my students would fare in their Geography GCSE last summer.  If their faces were anything to go by after the exam, I wasn’t feeling too hopeful. That is until I logged onto Twitter and read some of the student comments! If all else fails, we have a future generation of comedians in the making. Here are a few of my favourite post exam tweets:

In true geography teacher style, I happened to be in China last summer when the results came out. ‘Lesson planning on location’ as I like to call it! I nervously logged onto e-AQA at Shanghai airport. Having just spent a couple of weeks in geography heaven, I did fear my geography high was about to come crashing down. As Deputy Headteacher, I inherited some of the more ‘challenging’ students in my group. I don’t mind admitting that I frequently had flashbacks to my NQT days. Teaching global atmospheric circulation for the first time was a particularly low moment in my teaching career to date!

All of the leadership team at my school teach exam groups, including the Headteacher. Your credibility as a leader hangs very much in the balance when it comes to your own results. You can hardly hold others to account if your own results don’t stack up. Thankfully, I was pretty happy with my results overall. There’s always one or two students who, despite working their socks off, don’t quite pull off the grade you hoped for in the exam. However, my predictions were fairly accurate and I had a positive value added so I couldn't complain.  The enhanced results analysis on e-AQA showed a very positive picture for our department too.  We have a fantastic team of geographers but, like many schools, we simply ran out of time trying to teach the new specification. Pretty much the whole of the Economic Activity unit had been self-taught via a work booklet. I think I broke a teaching world record covering the whole topic in sub two hours. If I achieve nothing else in life, I have found an instant cure for insomnia!

So what lessons have I learned along the way?

Less is more When I first started teaching the specification, I was completely overwhelmed by the volume of content in the affiliated textbooks. Teaching mixed ability groups has proven especially challenging. No amount of differentiation can fully accommodate for students whose predicted grades range from a 2 to a 9. I have always ‘taught to the top’ but with increasing A level content in the new spec, I felt that I was losing my weaker students. Moreover, sticking to the recommended teaching hours was like running against a category 5 tropical storm!

I decided to start planning my lessons following the content in the CPG revision guide. To challenge my high ability students, I encouraged them to work independently using the textbooks. However, I quickly realised that this was not necessarily doing them any favours. How can you possibly condense a 4-page case study in a textbook into a one-page answer in an exam booklet? I found that my higher ability students were really struggling to answer 9 mark questions. Typically, they wanted to write everything they knew about the case study. I decided to focus less on content and more on how to structure answers. Now all students use the CPG guide as a foundation but I challenge the top end by encouraging them to use more complex terminology and place specific information. I still dip into textbooks and find them a great source of information for my own planning. I tend to mix and match rather than rely on one textbook to teach from.

I have always created my own model answers which I type up and photocopy. Increasingly, I found myself saying ‘you won’t be able to write this much in the exam’. I therefore decided to start handwriting model answers at the same time as my students. Not only is this time saving as a teacher but it also gives students a realistic idea of what is possible in the given time. If I can’t condense the content into a Level 3 answer, how can my students? I use a camera app on my laptop to display my answer which I later photocopy for them. Students are expected make notes from my verbal feedback and improve their answers in red pen. I make it pretty clear that I won’t be writing detailed feedback on their answers and issue sanctions to students who don’t red pen their work with improvements.

It’s all about the spec! I’m going to confess that in my first few years of teaching, I didn’t really pay much attention to the exam specifications. I rather naively relied on the schemes of work provided by the department and the textbooks. Now, I make reference to the specification in every lesson. All students are provided with a copy of the specification for each unit of work. I drill it into them that they have to know the meaning of every single word in the specification. I have moved away from using exercise books and instead produce work booklets that have headings from the specification alongside exam questions from the specimen papers. Initially, I gave them a separate booklet of sample questions but I now interleave questions so students can see the link between the wording in the spec and the exam questions. This way, there are no nasty shocks when words like agribusiness or physical processes come up in the exam. As a teacher, I can easily spot work that students need to catch up on. It also helps to reduce planning in the long term as all of the worksheets and exam questions are pre-printed in the booklet. 

Initially, the work booklets went down like marmite with my students. For the 'lovers', it has really helped them to organise their notes especially since there are no loose worksheets. Even the initial ‘haters’ now see the benefit of having everything in one booklet to revise from. I appreciate that this approach wouldn't appeal to all teachers but it works for me. Whist they initially take quite a lot of time to produce, it pays off in the long term. I tend to set notes as homework and concentrate on exam questions in the lessons. 

I start all of my lessons with literacy activities using the words from the spec e.g. bingo, A-Z, heads and tails. When deconstructing exam questions, I make students look at the wording in the specification to see the correlation. I have found that the biggest barrier to students is the wording of exam questions rather than a lack of knowledge. The 'less is more approach' to delivering content allows me to dedicate more time to covering academic language. Repetition is key here. You want students to become as familiar with words like formation and landforms, as they are with the everyday language that they use. 

Teach from the mark schemes I have confessed to ditching the textbooks and teaching from the CPG guides which may horrify some geography teachers. However, I also base my planning on sample papers and mark schemes. How often have you gone through mark schemes and discovered content that you have never come across in a textbook? The indicative content in last summer’s exam papers is sometimes far better than the content in the textbooks. If you want to do exam practice but haven’t time to mark 30+ answers, try some simple tasks like:

Give students the mark scheme. Use the AQA command word list and specification to write an exam question. I have done this as a competition to see which students can get the closest to the actual question

Blank out some of the words in the indicative content and provide a word grid at the bottom. Students to guess the missing word

Use the indicative content to write the answer. It’s a skill in itself condensing the indicative content into a one-page answer

I have also put the sample questions and mark schemes from each topic into a PPT that I share with students via our online homework platform. The PPT has an exam question on one slide followed by the mark  scheme on the next slide. I encourage students to work their way through the PPT as part of their revision by tackling a few questions at a time. Whilst I see the benefit of flashcards and mind-maps, I firmly believe that the key to success is practising exam questions under timed conditions. I dedicate a lot of my lesson time to breaking down exam questions by looking at each individual word and planning how to answer it using a variety of templates and structure strips.

Don’t reinvent the wheel…unless it’s quicker There are some amazing online resources to dip into, not least the AQA Geography Facebook group and Schoology resources. However, it comes with a warning. If it takes you longer to find the resource than to make your own, is it really time saving? That said, the community of geographers that contribute to online forums should be commended. Quite possibly some of the best CPD you will get is from other teachers sharing their ideas on social media.

Be a teacher on tour! Geek is chic in my lessons! I make no apology for being a complete geography geek and play up to the reputation of being a bit crazy. My travel partners are well used to filming me ‘on location’. Whilst my students take the mickey out of me for it, I think when they look back in years to come they will remember my ‘Miss Thom in her geography heaven’ moments.

When the going gets tough, get creative! I will be the first to admit that my lessons have started to become like an exam factory. Fortunately, our school took the move to deliver GSCEs over three years. This has enabled me to be creative again and to have some rest bite from teaching the heavy content. My favourite activity is to put out paper, glue and scissors and simply get students to summarise the topic by making a model that they have to label with key terms. Not only is this a great way to consolidate learning but you have some pretty impressive models to display during open evenings. Moreover, there are times when you simply don’t have the capacity to mark more written work but don’t want to compromise student progress.

If doubt, turn to You Tube! I can't imagine teaching now without using video clips to bring the topic alive. There are so many fantastic clips and documentaries to enrich lessons. Online forums are a great way to spread the work about a useful clip. More recently, I discovered the 'Time for Geography' website. I love the fact that the clips are delivered by students and have used these to generate discussions about studying geography at university.

If I don't feel very confident on a particular aspect of the specification, I show a video clip rather than try to blag my way through it. I certainly had to do this with global atmospheric circulation. After the third time of teaching it, I think I have finally grasped it!

Finally, I would like to thank all of the geography teachers who share their ideas and resources on Facebook and Twitter. Not only have you reassured me but you have also inspired me along the way.