Author: @geographycase

Simulations are often left out of post-16 teaching because they are perceived as taking too much preparation on the part of the teacher, too much time out of the lesson, and giving too little knowledge to the students compared to a ‘regular’ lesson.

But simulations have some huge benefits. They are memorable, flexible, fun, stimulating and allow synthesis to develop. Here are some ways to get simulations into lessons more effectively.

Simulations aren’t real

There’s no need to make the simulation life-like. Just because you’re trying to study how different development issues are prioritised doesn’t mean you have to simulate the entire process that led to the Sustainable Development Goals. Just make sure the students experience a little bit of the real thing by, for example, using the correct terms for the Judge / Chair / Chief Executive / etc, and if possible use the person’s real name.

Keep it simple

Simulations can be very simple. Get students into teams; tell them they are competing against the others, and that they will win depending on simple criteria. Unless the simulation is meant to be about a process e.g. the workings of the European Union, you can reimagine it to fit your needs.

Visuals are important

If it looks like a classroom, and sounds like a classroom, it probably is a classroom. Make it look different – arrange the tables, print out some flags, wear a costume, anything to make it look more like a different experience.

Sound is important

If you have different countries participating, play the national anthems (they’re easily available on YouTube) as each country steps up. It’s fun, changes the dynamic of the room, and gives the students a minute or so to get ready.

Don’t let it take too long

A single lesson for preparation (plus homework), and less than a single lesson for the simulation itself, should be sufficient. Ensure students don’t go over their allotted time for any presentation or discussion – be ruthless, and this problem will disappear over time as the students learn to match expectations.

Use existing resources

Simulations can take minutes to organise. For example, you could simulate the decision of where to hold the 2024 and 2028 Olympics by reopening the bid process from 2015; the bids have all been presented and published, so the resources are already there. Make it more focused by asking cities to present on just three criteria e.g. organisational capability, economic impact and social development.

Use real-life opportunities

Most geographical topics have a world summit each year which will give the simulation an extra relevance. For example, the World Cities Summit is an annual event. In 2018 the venue is Singapore.

A great technique to focus students is to give the final assignment well in advance of the deadline, and even before the teaching for it has occurred.

By asking students to consider the question without prior knowledge, we encourage creative responses – precisely the sort of original thinking loved by examiners. The main pitfall of such creativity is an irrelevant response, or even ideas that are just plain wrong. However, because the student goes on to study the issue before writing their response, they are encouraged to remain flexible and reconsider their original response frequently. Ultimately this contributes to the development of what our parents often claim we lacked as teenagers – common sense.

Common sense is simply the application of prior understandings into a new context. Young people are still establishing these understandings and so they sometimes land on a misconception through no fault of their own. When this happens after a round of instruction it can make students feel stupid and a failure. It’s precisely the lack of any prior learning that allows them to be flexible and confidently let misconceptions go.

A good example is an in-class essay. The essay title can be shared, and students create possible responses. The teaching then frames the essay, resulting in a clearer essay plan that will incorporate the clearly important ideas (they were taught in class so they must be important, right?). Meanwhile, as ideas are taught in class, students will be checking against their own ideas to develop more complex responses.

We’ve all been there. It’s 8.55am, and the students are going to arrive in five minutes. You’ve been coming down with something for the last couple of days, the cat was sick on the carpet this morning just as you were leaving for work, the Principal stopped by for a ‘quick chat’ that went on for twenty minutes and – oh the students are here now. Better start teaching! Except, you don’t have a lesson plan.

You’re a pro, so you start the lesson with a decent(ish) starter: remind the person next to you what you did last lesson and come up with three words that summarise the experience. Great, they’re doing something that’ll keep them busy for a few minutes while you turn on the projector and find BBC One Minute World News or CNN10 to fill time while you work out what the lesson will be, all the while secretly panicking that you’ll appear unprepared or worse, incompetent.

But, as a pro, you know the kind of thing you want to do. You know the basic arguments, and you know the rough outline of the evidence that might be useful. At this point, it’s a great opportunity to turn the content generation to the students. Give them an outline of the issue from the top of your head; use two different colour markers on the board with a secret colour coding of your choice, then ask what the colours mean, so it looks planned. And then, ask the students to find four graphs, images, diagrams or something else that they think explain the issue. They will all have a browser on their phone as a minimum, and if not then you’re probably in a school with textbooks so they can search through those instead. (Meanwhile, you can quickly check the syllabus to find out what the essential points are.)

Ah! But that’s just an ‘off you go’ lesson isn’t it? That’s going to get you a ‘poor’ in your teacher evaluations. If you leave it there – or just ask students to ‘write about the results’ – no, you’re not going to win a teaching award.

But the lesson actually revolves around where you go next. And this is where you can emphasise skills, synthesis, evaluation and content. For example:

• Split the whiteboard into sections so that each student/pair/group has a space. They have to choose the most interesting/convincing/controversial/simple graphic and copy it onto the board by hand. This is a good test of sketching skills. After briefly discussing the results as a class, students can sit down again and decide the order to present the evidence. Make it even more interesting by creating a CSI-style ‘murder board’ linking evidence together with lines using a big red marker. And that becomes the essay plan that they can write for the rest of the lesson.
• Students have to present an elevator pitch for their chosen graphic. It must explain why this is the most interesting/convincing/controversial/simple graphic in under one minute. Make it even more challenging by not allowing them to share the graphic itself, so they have to describe it first.
• Create an exhibition in the room. Students can either print out their graphic(s) or show them on the original screen if digital citizenship isn’t a fraught issue in the school (well done! what’s your secret?). Put a sheet of A4 paper by each ‘exhibit’ and ask students to provide feedback on each one. This is great practice for critically reviewing evidence.
• Knock outs are a great form of collaborative competition if you have 4, 8, 16 or 32 students (and can be adapted to other numbers by having the ‘match’ between groups of three with one winner). Each person ‘plays’ against another, with the winner being the better graphic as decided between either the two students or by another ‘spectator’ group. Players then form a team to defend their graphic in the next round. Add the winners to a knock-out systems diagram on the board. You’ll end up with a very convincing graphic at the top and the less convincing at the lower stages. Importantly, the students with the weakest graphics will see what made the strongest graphics better as they progress through the rounds.

These are simple ways to ensure that information found by the students is accurate, useful and critically evaluated. And best of all, it requires almost no planning. So now you can go home tonight and enjoy that third glass of wine without worrying about the consequences for tomorrow morning!

 

 

 

 

One of the things I often struggle with is trusting my students to do what is required. Even the best student sometimes seems to fail to hand in an assignment, or to follow the essay guide, or to use the case studies that I suggested. None of this is their fault, nor mine – it’s just part of the learning process.

We have been drilled over the last few decades to celebrate diversity in the responses our students give us. We tell them that the examiner doesn’t want to read twenty versions of the same essay. We say it’s boring if they choose the same template for their PowerPoints. We encourage the class to move around to break up the lesson into more engaging segments.

Yet when students take the initiative, we frown up on it even if we don’t mean to.

I didn’t ask you to find out about North Korea for your essay on the International Monetary Fund! Why did you include a segment about regolith removal when the essay was meant to be about biodiversity? What do you mean you decided to throw away the assignment and start again with only half an hour to go?

If that sounds familiar – even if it’s just your inner voice speaking, and you wouldn’t dream of saying that to the students – then you’re like me. Because although I say that I want students to be independent, I also like to know that I am helping them. And that can easily conflate into a need to control – sorry, I mean a need to guide.

So when the student does something that is just plain wrong, I get frustrated. Why didn’t they use the example I told them? Why didn’t they follow the essay plan I gave them? Why didn’t they just do the work when I told them to?

That’s when I need to slow down and remember that they are learning. If they don’t make these mistakes, they’ll always struggle to work out where the limits are.

So, this post has been about one simple thing: trial and error. Trust your students not to avoid mistakes, but to make them. And then deal with the resulting errors as a learning experience not for you (in that you change the way you instruct them to avoid the same mistake again) but for them. And eventually, you’ll be able to trust them to do work that is beyond your expectations because it is original, interesting and logical.

 

 

 

 

This is sometimes a good question to ask students in relation to the geographical phenomenon being studied. 

By asking students to self identify the links to their own lives, we are offering them several opportunities:

• Validation. Their opinions count 
• A framework for thinking. Previous gut reactions may be based on existing bodies of knowledge 
• Flexibility. Students may decide they were wrong about something because of the new information they now have 
• Confidence. Students will be more likely to speak confidently because their life is the subject matter 
• Self awareness. Understanding how they fit into the world can make people more clear about their view of themselves 

An example is where they fit into the Cohen and Plog classifications of tourism.

1.  Students can fill in a simple questionnaire about their preferences and then identify whether they are probably allocentric or psychocentric tourists. 
2. Using the theories and ideas on the factors that affect personal participation in sports and tourism, they can examine the validity of the ideas in relation to themselves (there’s nothing better than finding the limits of a theory telling you what you ought to be like!)
3. They can then plan their own gap year or holiday and prove to Mum and Dad that they’ve thought it through properly. And off they go for a year on a beach in Bali!