100 Ideas for Secondary Teachers

Overall Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ 

Why this book?
This book was published in 2017 and proved invaluable to me in those early years of teaching when you’re very much still adding to your arsenal of teaching ideas, techniques and strategies. Whilst the thinking in education has changed such that some ideas now seem out of date (e.g. Idea 66: mark Pupil Premium books first) many are timeless classics that are invaluable for developing inquisitive and questioning geographers. Indeed, this is a book that all PGCE and NQT geography teachers should read (and refer back to at times when your creativity might begin drying up!).

If you’re like me, the first few weeks of term see your brain bursting with ideas for the best possible lessons but as the workload mounts and your time becomes stretched, maintaining this creativity can become a challenge. That’s why I love books like this that are easy to flick through and remind yourself of different ways of effectively delivering content. As suggested above, do read with a critical eye; changed thinking in both geography education and wider education means that using some of the ideas may require careful planning to ensure that the doing of the activity doesn’t dominate the learning.

Three key takeaways
Idea 9: How many UKs can you get in…?
Encourage problem-solving and estimation skills by challenging the class to calculate how many times the UK would ft into the place under investigation.

I remember loving this idea when I first opened this book several years ago and eagerly inserting it into every scheme of work we taught. To this day it remains, helping students to understand the relative size of countries that we study. Students are provided with the land area of both countries and have to work out how many times the UK could fit within the country of question. This proves particularly important when studying China and Brazil and I do enjoy the look on their faces as they process the fact that the UK could fit into China 39 times.

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Idea 18: Banned words
The whole aim of this approach is that, when used from day one of Year 7, students become used to writing succinct answers that use specific geographical terminology.

Again, this is a firm favourite of mine and something that has been incredibly important to my classroom practice since my NQT days! Rather than ‘banned words’, I chose to brand all reference to specific geographical terminology under the umbrella of ‘Speaking Like A Geographer’ and this is something I speak about regularly. To read previous blog posts on the idea, click here.

Idea 82: Matching stats to images
This activity will challenge the misconceptions that your students have of their local area.

I frequently use this idea in the Regenerating Places topic of A-Level to challenge student thinking. Too often they have huge misconceptions about a place and, unless challenged, these continue throughout the local case study. Whilst I haven’t used this idea at GCSE before, as I write this I’m thinking of how it could prove useful in dispelling myths here too… I wonder if students would correctly match up deforestation figures to the images of the taiga and tropical rainforest? Would students match up statistics on the UK’s energy mix to the correct energy source? Let’s see!