New GCSE Textbook for OCR B now out

It's now just over two and a half years since I went to a meeting at the offices of Hodder down in London, to start the process of writing a set of textbooks and support materials for the then-as-yet-written OCR GCSE Geography specifications for first teaching from September 2016.
The authoring team of Jo Payne, Jo Debens and myself were joined by Simon Ross, and we had the editing talents of David Rogers helping to steer the project, as well as Ruth Murphy from Hodder and numerous editors and other publishing professionals at various points during the project. Earlier today, the postman brought me a package, and I finally held the results of hundreds of hours of effort in my hand.

I wrote quite a few chapters in the end, and also helped to create the digital support materials, and the answers to all the various activities that have been included in the book. These all form part of the support materials that are available.

More details about the books are here, where you can find out about the various options for ordering. There are various options for discounts and inspection copies if you look at various sections of the website.

Thanks to all those who helped me with writing the books in various ways, including Ian Ward, Bryan Ledgard and Richard Allaway for the use of their images in my chapters. I managed to get quite a lot of my own pictures in, which was nice.

If you're teaching OCR specification for GCSE, please consider making our book(s) your set text. Order plenty just in case… It would be a pity for it not to sell a lot after all that effort...

GCSE Changes and the GA Conference

Plenty of useful content for those teaching GCSE Geography to be gained at the GA Conference 2014
Materials from many of the sessions will be added to the GA Conference page in the weeks to come...
Here are some delegates looking at a really useful book for GCSE Fieldwork...

GCSEs are changing... are you ready ?

Published today by the DfE - new guidance on Subject Content for GCSE Geography.
Click here for PDF download.

Some interesting clarification on content, use of GIS, nature of FIELDWORK etc.

This includes the loss of Controlled Assessment as fieldwork is assessed 'through examination only'

There is mention of GIS to be used for certain tasks, and also guidance on the use of statistical techniques.
Some interesting physical and human geography also emerging.
I quite like the focus on urban challenges, something I've written about before...

Download the document and have a look yourself...

It's what you'll be teaching in a few year's time...

Remember that you can get ahead of your planning by checking out the BADGER BOOK

Will the reformed GCSEs be better GCSEs ?

Here's the latest from OFQUAL following the GCSE consultation...


Tiering

We believe that the curriculum content for geography can be the same for all students and that all students can be assessed in the same way. We propose that the reformed GCSE in geography should not be tiered.

Forms of assessment

Our controlled assessment review found a good deal of agreement that carrying out fieldwork is essential for students of GCSE geography. There was less agreement about whether it is possible to assess fieldwork skills as part of GCSE geography assessment, although there was a view that some of the skills – data manipulation, interpretation and analysis, for example – can be assessed through written exams. There were many concerns about the nature of school fieldwork exercises which many schools complete in a single day. Even the most capable students are unlikely to have the time during one day of fieldwork to experiment with alternative approaches to data collection, which means that they are not able to reflect on, further analyse and evaluate their work.

There are also issues of fairness for all students. We found that if teachers designed poor fieldwork exercises then that could prevent students from performing well, or from accessing all of the marking criteria.

The curriculum content requires students to undertake fieldwork, but the related knowledge and skills can be assessed by written exam set and marked by the exam board. We therefore propose that all assessment for the reformed geography GCSE should be by written exams alone and that the total assessment time should be no less than 3.5 hours.