RESOURCES FOR GEOGRAPHY TEACHERS ON ACTION RESEARCH/PROFESSIONAL ENQUIRY GA Teacher Education Working Group

Starting point GATEWG proposed a publication on action research for geography teachers; MTL came along – fog descended; The publication committee liked the idea but questioned the size of the market; We considered other publication formats; I discovered Clare Brooks Routledge book.

Personal view Any such resources should: Encourage innovative curriculum – enquiry, collaboration, narrative approaches, learning beyond school; Encourage good instruction – high level (and contested) subject knowledge, explanation, feedback; Encourage visual methodologies – image-based research, mapping methods, visual elicitation; Encourage models that are self-correcting.

Questions What is the need/demand for geography oriented professional learning support materials? (in what format?) How far is/will this be met? What good assignment/dissertation exemplars exist? What are the important context factors? Who has a professional/research interest in this?

Stumuli: (i) John Hatties Visible Learning John Hattie has been collecting effect sizes for 20+ years in relation to research on education interventions and has produced a league table with a crucial benchmark at 0.4. Does this provide any pointers? See Geoff Pettys review.

(ii) Six key themes in curriculum for C21st research reviews 1. The effectiveness of learning that is context based (dealing with ideas and phenomena in real or simulated practical situations) most notably in reviews of science and maths; 2. The importance of connecting the curriculum with young peoples experiences of home and community and the related, but also distinctive theme of parental involvement in childrens learning in the home;

Six key themes in curriculum for C21st research reviews 3. The impact on pupil motivation and learning of structured dialogue in group work and of collaborative learning; 4. The need to create opportunities to identify and build on pupils existing conceptual understandings – again notably in science and maths. Several reviewers also found evidence of unexplored poor misunderstandings arising from teaching to the test;

Six key themes in curriculum for C21st research reviews 5. The need to remove rigidity in the approach to the curriculum - to allow time and space for conceptual development, to encourage integration of cross-curricular learning; and 6. The need for excellence and professional development in subject knowledge – without which teachers would be unable to seize opportunities for curriculum innovation, particularly in relation to context-based learning.

(iii) Other influences? MTL will probably happen but hard to predict; Evidence does point to the value of collaborative, classroom-focused, school based, dialogue- generating professional learning (Cordingley EPPI reviews); The value of subject knowledge and challenging dysfunctional teaching beliefs – see Teacher Professional Learning and Development by Helen Timperley et al.