The Geography curriculum is designed around the organisational decision to integrate REAL Projects into Years 7 and 8. It is designed to ensure that students are sufficiently prepared for the GCSE course in terms of content and skills. Topic decisions are made based on typical knowledge ‘gaps’ from primary and KS3 and ensure breadth of content for students. Our 5 and 3 year plans formalise this information. We feel that AQA provide a wide range of topics and allow freedom to decide case studies. Edexcel was considered, however the examination structure appears to be less clear and AQA provides a clear structure for teaching and revision. AQA provides a rigorous yet accessible curriculum and prepares our students for the challenges of A-Level Geography. The Geography curriculum is designed to inspire students to question and investigate the world they live in. Mounts Bay has a heavy focus on the Global Goals, and our curriculum intends to foster inquisitive students, who wish to understand our planet. Our students learn through enquiry and projects in Years 7 and 8, and as such, Year 9 is designed to prepare them for the structure and rigour of the GCSE course.
We implement our curriculum via our Firefly VLC. This allows for a blended approach to learning where we believe students can reach their potential in and out of the classroom. All of our units of study start with an Essential Question which forms the enquiry. Knowledge organisers are used to provide students with an overview of a unit’s substantive knowledge. To ensure that students understand the material deeply we use a variety of didactic and independent learning approaches. Students are given clear learning objectives for each lesson and scaffolded to reach mastery via solo taxonomy learning outcomes. Learning in school is supported by a menu of consolidation and flipped learning opportunities. Feedback on students’ learning follows a Feedback, Feedforward and Question (where appropriate) model. Students are encouraged to reflect on where they have demonstrated High Performance Learning attributes and disciplinary concepts are highlighted to students. Finally, we have introduced an acronym to our students to facilitate them using historical evidence more effectively – STEPD.
To assess the impact of our curriculum we assess learning rigorously. All humanities subjects follow the faculty assessment policy to inform teacher understanding of student progress. In each learning quadmester students will complete:
The impact of the learning journey is communicated, and the students can assess the impact of the curriculum via the Learning Maps.