The purpose of the geography curriculum is to inspire curiosity in pupils, by creating a journey, through the curriculum, which instils a love and fascination for the subject and a sense of our place within the wider world.
Geography provides pupils with powerful knowledge of diverse places, people, resources, and environments, with a deep understanding of the Earth’s physical and human processes and the patterns this creates. The geography curriculum aims to create global citizens who understand the world around them and the topical issues facing people and the planet, to equip them with the skills to take part in the Geographical debates of today and tomorrow. The curriculum should prepare pupils for each stage of their academic journey but also the world beyond the classroom by ensuring that young people can think like geographers and use their geographical knowledge to make sense of the world around them, including a deep understanding of their home city, Sheffield.
The geography curriculum will give pupils a range of skills which will be built up and developed over time, whilst providing the opportunity to recap key concepts to combat the forgetting curve.
The curriculum has been sequenced to encourage increasing cognitive demand from Year 7 onwards. As pupils progress through the curriculum, expectations around understanding and application increases. Pupils acquire knowledge and the foundations of the subject in Year 7, but in expectations of written responses, the depth of understanding increases year on year. Therefore, by the end of Year 9, pupils should be able to apply their knowledge and understanding, think like geographers, take part in geographical debates, and be able to engage with enquiry in the subject. Assessments are also carefully planned to identify gaps in understanding so that misconceptions can be addressed to enable students to confidently tackle questions in Geography.
All students are challenged appropriately in lessons to enable them to all reach the same end point. All students need to develop an understanding of how to tackle extended questions in Geography in an appropriate way to meet the needs to the students in front of us.
The geography curriculum is carefully constructed at Sheffield Springs to allow students to build on their prior knowledge and make clear links between topics to understand the world around them at a deep level. It is important that students don’t think of Geography as stand-alone lessons and they see it as story which educates and inspires, linking human and physical processes.
Long-term plans are sequenced in a way that provides students with manageable chunks of information in a logical pattern. For example, in the Year 7 rivers topic, we begin with ‘The River Long Profile’, ‘Erosion’ and ‘Transportation’ and then we teach the different physical features in a way that builds on the prior knowledge. Students wouldn’t be able to understand the formation of the waterfall without the basic understandings of where waterfalls would be located within the long profile and the different types of erosion which form this feature.
The geography curriculum that has been established for 2023-2024 has been tailored to allow students to successfully access Geography across all key stages. The weather and climate topic, Middle East topic and Sheffield enquiry are new topics which will be taught this year to instil a deeper understanding of the world around them and so that students, even if they do not go onto
GCSE or post 16 Geography study, can use this to make sense of the key issues in the world today. There is more content in the news and on social media about climate change than ever before and, I want my team to incorporate the knowledge across a range of topics so that students can understand the Geographical discussions happening around them.
By having a good understanding of the areas of the Geography curriculum students may find challenging, it allows us to reflect on the best ways to teach content to our students. Content needs to be delivered in manageable chunks of information, using the teacher as the expert to establish the key processes which can then be confidently applied to independent tasks. It is important to scaffold extended writing in a way that allows students to apply what they know to the task for them to have a high success rate. This will help us to close the gaps that have previously been evident when students automatically believed that they couldn’t accomplish an activity. It is also important that we understand as the class teacher when to take the scaffolds away to build confidence when answering questions independently.