Getting creative with your curriculum discusses ways to make the curriculum more creative and engaging for students. It provides quotes about creativity, collaboration, and embracing new ideas. Teachers are encouraged to abandon silos and allow for floating topicality to make lessons more relevant and help students understand the world.

1. Getting creative with your curriculum
David Rogers
@davidErogers
davidrogers.org

2. What is weather and how does it affect people?
Do now:
Using the shapes below, create a sketch map
of the UK. You can rotate them and resize.
You can use any type of triangle
Mark on the location of: London, Cardiff,
Edinburgh, Belfast

5. ‘Our
Priory days
were akin to
working in
Area 51
compared
to most
places’

6. Creativity?

7. NationalGeographic,Jan2015

8. ‘…contact between groups, which accelerated the
speed of innovative ideas from one mind to another,
creating a kind of collective brain.’
National Geographical Jan 2015

9. ‘When populations again fell below critical mass, groups
became isolated, leaving new ideas nowhere to go.
What innovations had been established withered and
died.’
National Geographical Jan 2015

10. Change is inevitable - except from a vending
machine. ~Robert C. Gallagher

13. “Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build
your wings on the way down”
Ray Bradbury

14. Teachers’ Standard 4

15. 4. Plan and teach well structured lessons
promote a love of learning
and children’s intellectual curiosity

16. A high-quality geography education should inspire in pupils a
curiosity and fascination about the world and its people that will
remain with them for the rest of their lives. Teaching should equip
pupils with knowledge about diverse places, people, resources and
natural and human environments, together with a deep understanding
of the Earth’s key physical and human processes. As pupils progress,
their growing knowledge about the world should help them to deepen
their understanding of the interaction between physical and human
processes, and of the formation and use of landscapes and
environments. Geographical knowledge, understanding and skills
provide the framework and approaches that explain how the Earth’s
features at different scales are shaped, interconnected and change
over time.
Purpose of study

17. A high-quality geography education should inspire in pupils a
curiosity and fascination about the world and its people that will
remain with them for the rest of their lives. Teaching should equip
pupils with knowledge about diverse places, people, resources and
natural and human environments, together with a deep understanding
of the Earth’s key physical and human processes. As pupils progress,
their growing knowledge about the world should help them to deepen
their understanding of the interaction between physical and human
processes, and of the formation and use of landscapes and
environments. Geographical knowledge, understanding and skills
provide the framework and approaches that explain how the Earth’s
features at different scales are shaped, interconnected and change
over time.
Purpose of study

18. Photo credit via flickr
Geographers should
embrace new content
as an opportunity to
develop our subject.

19. Chat:
What are
your biggest
content
fears in the
new
curriculum?
Photo credit via Flickr

20. Africa
Russia
Asia (Including China and India)
Middle East
Environmental regions
Polar and hot deserts
Key human and physical characteristics
Countries and major cities
Geological timescales
Rocks, weathering, soils
Climate change: Ice Age to the present
Glaciation
Maths
Linking to KS4

21. Is your curriculum full of
JONK?

22. ‘Enquiry is not something to be defined once and for all
on paper. It is something to be developed in the
classroom in particular school and curriculum contexts.’
Margaret Roberts, Learning through enquiry, p25

23. 1. What is the point of school
if it doesn't help you
understand the world
around you?
2. Teachers are in the ideal
position to challenge media
bias and editorial decisions.
3. Topical issues are an
opportunity to reinforce and
help revisit prior learning.
Floating topicality

25. Glaciation
Iceland and big
subglacial volcanoes
Geological
Timescale
Continental Drift – Mid
Atlantic ridge
Everest: access,
avalanche, honeypot
Is tourism in Iceland
sustainable?
Asia
Water supply and
climate change
Ban silos – creative curriculum design
How did the
Himalayas form?
Climate
Change

26. Everest: access,
avalanche, honeypot
Cosy clothes
manufactured in
Nepal
Made in Nepal, just like
us…. Weaving
together ancient
wisdom and modern
technology. We create
80% of our products
right here in Nepal. This
means the world to us
socially, economically,
environmentally. This
labour of love supports
the livelihood of a
Nepali family and helps
us to keep alive a
centuries-old craft.

27. Interleaving and desirable difficulties
Bjork and Bjork, 2011
Coe et al, 2014
Brown, Roediger III, McDaniel, 2014
Allison Blog

31. Develop
contextual
knowledge of
the location of
globally
significant
places – both
terrestrial and
marine.

32. Non-statutory

34. 24 January, 2015
What is geological time and why is it important to geographers?
How old is the Earth?
How long have animals been around on Earth?
How long have people been around on Earth?

35. 24 January 2015 Has the world always looked the way it has?
Has the Earth always looked the same? Think about this images from NASA
and write an 80 word response. Try to give reasons why it has changed and
why it is the same.
Use work from last lesson.

36. Map from memory

37. Think, Pair, Share.
What’s this? Why doesn’t the earth look like this today? How do we
know?
Pangea

39. Continental drift: how would you prove it?

44. 24 January, 2015 What is the climate like on the African continent?
Starter challenges:
1. Approximately, how many times can you fit
the UK into the African continent?
UK Land area: 83,698 sq mi
African continent land area: 11.7 million sq mi
2. How many miles, north to south, is the
African continent?

45. 139 times.

49. Where?

52. Even makes
oxbow lakes look
cool?

54. Photos hyperlink to original source.

55. Photos hyperlink to original source.

56. If this mountain is so dangerous why then is climbing it so
important for Nepal’s economy?

57. Developed or not?

58. Developed or not?

59. So why are these people so important?

60. So if they are so important why did this
happen?
And what do you think the impact of this could be
on Nepal?

61. Surprised?
Where is this
person?
What are they
walking into?
Beat the
teacher!
You have 10
questions.
Can you figure
out what
happened?

62. Map detectives!
• Order the maps on your table into
order
• In your exercise book:
• Describe what has happened?
• Why do you think this has
happened?

63. Pirates and Social Networking
In 2009…..

64. Lesson 1
• Background and research into 21st Century
piracy. Include Bing web, maps and image
search
Lesson 2
• Using Twitter and Facebook to gather
‘Real’ data for students to engage with.
Using blogs to collaborate and action plan
Lesson 3
• Using Twitter live within the lesson to
provide a ‘real’ task, deadlines and
feedback.

65. List 5 words that you associate with Pirates

66. Produced using wordle.net and used under creative commons license
Wordle.net

70. Gather data via
Twitter before
the lesson
Present the
information –
analysis
Link the data to
the topic being
studied
Get pupils to
interact with the
information,
song, poem,
presentation,
news report…..
Using Social Networking to provide data

71. Using Social Networking in real time
Use through
teacher account,
visible to the class
via a data
projector.
Get class to
interact with
Twitter network by
asking questions,
responding to
questions
Pupils work
collaboratively to
react to questions

74. www.google.co.uk/alerts

75. “Your are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more
amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here
to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.”
Woodrow Wilson.

76. ‘What gets you out of bed in the morning and in
to school?’
@davidErogers