Category: Teaching and Learning

How many zombie ideas prowl our minds?

There are many stories about the undead, rising from the grave to threaten us when we thought they’d gone away.  All entertaining enough, and darkly comedic too.

But there are other zombies too – zombie ideas.  As Australian economist John Quiggin notes, “Some ideas live on because they are useful. Others die and are forgotten. But even when they have proved themselves wrong and dangerous, ideas are very hard to kill. Even after the evidence seems to have killed them, they keep on coming back.”

It’s tempting to believe that all of what you learnt at school still holds true today.  This may be correct in most cases.  But whatever age you are, so much of what you learnt is out-of-date, yet it re-emerges as a zombie idea later in life.

Zombie ideas in education

As a Geography teacher, I am acutely aware of the need to slay these zombies and to keep up to date with developments in the human and natural world since my own school days.  So, for example, the idea that the world is split into a rich ‘north’ and a static, impoverished ‘south’ should be replaced with a more dynamic and complex picture.  Similarly, my understanding of why tectonic plates (slabs of the earth’s crust) move has, thanks to educators like Alistair Hamill, moved beyond simplistic models of ‘convection currents’.  And whilst many teachers (like me, until recently) like to portray Thomas Malthus as a pessimist who saw population growth forever curtailed by famine and war, he actually had more nuanced views.

In education, teachers have been subjected to several discredited initiatives.  These include the notion of ‘learning styles’, which categorises pupils as either ‘visual’, ‘auditory’ or ‘kinaesthetic’ learners.  Veteran teachers will regale you of lesson plans which needed to address all three styles of learning, or even of pupils wearing badges indicating their status.  The ‘zombie idea’ of each pupil having a preferred learning style has since been dismissed, yet it persists in some corners of the system.

Why do we accept certain ideas?

We shouldn’t be too harsh on ourselves, as it is very tempting to accept certain ideas.  Some of them seem to be ‘common sense’, and therefore they appeal to us, as we often default to the simplest explanations.  Other ideas remain with us because we are wary of challenging them, as we were introduced to them by a figure of authority, such as a teacher or a parent.

Some ideas become accepted because they are repeated so many times, and in so many places, that we find it hard to believe that so many people can be wrong.  One of these ideas, Quiggin writes, is ‘trickle-down economics’: the idea that policies that benefit the wealthy will ultimately help everybody.  This idea had its heyday in the Reaganite and Thatcherite 1980s and 1990s, and this zombie was briefly resurrected by Liz Truss, despite being rejected by most economists.

Often, though, ideas persist because there is no reason to challenge them: they don’t seem to interfere with our daily lives, and so we just carry on living with them.  But it is important to continually reassess our ideas, to see which ones are zombies, and which ones deserve to live on.  This is especially applicable to the most persistent zombie ideas – those that are still with us because it takes a lot of time and effort, and a readjustment of our worldviews, to believe otherwise.

Slaying the ‘It’s natural!’ zombie idea

One such persistent zombie idea is that contemporary climate change is natural and that we are powerless to act.  Most of us now accept the ‘inconvenient truth’ that human activity has caused the recent extremely rapid rise in air temperature and the number of extreme weather events.  However, hardly a week passes when a columnist, letter writer, blogger, or ‘professional contrarian’ like Julia Hartley-Brewer resurrects the zombie idea of natural factors being behind recent changes in our climate.

Yes, our climate has changed significantly through the ages, but the pace of change in recent years is unprecedented.  It is incredible to still be writing this in 2022, but the climate science is clear: humans are behind the most recent period of warming – according to the IPCC, “Observed increases in well-mixed greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations since around 1750 are unequivocally caused by human activities” – and excess carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere mean that rises in temperature are baked into the atmosphere for decades to come, threatening civilisation and the biosphere alike.

Whenever and wherever you see the zombie idea of ‘natural climate change’ raise its ugly head, ask yourself why it is being expressed.  Is it to achieve notoriety and payment for expressing outrageous views?  Is it to protect vested interests in a certain way of life?  Or is it because insufficient time has been spend critically examining the idea?

This autumn, let’s launch this zombie onto the bonfire and reset our conversation towards two more urgent aims: how can we control our emissions before we get to an irretrievably awful climatic situation, and how can we ensure that all parts of the world can adequately adapt to the changes that are already underway, and that will be with us in the future?

Classroom calm.  Source: www.scholastic.com 

“Forget the lectures, this is what you really need to know about teaching”.

I still remember it clearly.  I was part of a group of trainee teachers, at the start of our PGCE course.  We spent half an hour in a DT classroom with a plain-speaking teacher who had been briefed to tell us about how to approach the basics of teaching.  I am afraid I forget his name.  Let’s call him Mr Practical.

Mr Practical said he had worked in industry for a few years then he switched to teaching and had been doing so for nine years.  He said something about nine years being a long time.  Well, I am writing this after spending almost double that length of time and some days I know how it feels!  Anyway, back to the session…

Mr Practical got out a pile of books and a variety of pieces of stationery.  Then he used these as props whilst he rattled through the practicalities of classroom management.  Vygotsky and Piaget could wait.  This is what us ‘new kids’ urgently needed, and Mr Practical knew it!

I am happy to admit that I still make elemental bloopers in my classroom teaching and I pick up hints all of the time.  But thinking back to that session, there are plenty of short cuts to effective teaching in a classroom scenario that I have taken with me.  Sometimes I have gone too far – I have cut corners.  The semantic difference is slight – but crucial.

Cutting corners either short-changes the students, or adds stress on you further down the line, or inconveniences someone else.  Or all three.  Short cuts are about effective practice, freeing you up to teach!

So, in a homage to Mr Practical, and as a way of ‘passing in on’, here are some ways of cutting corners which should be avoided, and some short cuts which you might like to try instead.

More hints – which could be called ‘short cuts’ but which are really just good practice – can be found in this post about how to respond to your students’ desire for help without giving them the answer or stifling their curiosity.

I am, of course, open to suggestions for more – and of criticism (see the last row in the table)!

David

Why should educational research be the preserve of academics and teachers?  Let the students have a go!

Figure 1: Students busy taking part in the Comprehension Comparison Challenge

(L-R: Listening, reading, dual coding, noting)

Engaging with the findings of educational research has become more embedded in the lives of teachers in the UK in recent years.  The ranks of academics are being joined by a growing number of teachers and leaders engaging in research – whether as active creators of projects, or as enthusiastic consumers of the findings of others.

Philippa Cordingley, Chief Executive of the UK’s Centre for Use of Research and Evidence in Education (CUREE), notes that “recent research by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) about teachers’ research engagement in English schools suggested that teachers are willing to engage more with research evidence than was the case a decade or two ago, and many schools are supportive of evidence use” (Cordingley, 2019: 142).

I wonder how often teachers refer explicitly to research in class?  After all, if students are told that ‘research shows that this works’, perhaps they would be willing to trust and engage with certain approaches?  Members of my Year 12 tutor group were certainly interested when they learned of one of the findings of the ‘VESPA Mindset’ model: 20 hours independent study a week strongly correlates with attaining A and A* grades at A Level.

Getting the students involved

This week I also began to wonder how often we engage students in the process of educational research?  I have a particularly compliant and open-minded Year 10 Geography class, so in one lesson I had a go at following a compressed version of the scientific method to try out a snippet of educational research in one 45 minute lesson.

By the end of Key Stage 3, Geography students will have had to “collect, analyse and draw conclusions from geographical data” via fieldwork (Department for Education, 2013) and they would also have had practice in the scientific method in science lessons, so the process would not have been new to them.

This wasn’t the fruit of a long period of pondering – it came from the experience of planning a lesson and realising that it was probably going to be uninspiring for the students unless I added something extra to it.  It also came from a keenness to get the students involved in finding out what learning approaches might work for them.

I had one lesson to play with.  So what did I do and how did it go?

1. Formulating an enquiry theme

I started by asking my students how they might go about assimilating and understanding an unfamiliar double-page textbook spread.  As I hoped for, two responses duly came back: ‘reading’ and ‘noting’.  I then asked the class to refer back to a previous lesson where I had extolled the virtues of ‘dual coding’ (using visuals to aid understanding) – in this case, it was a simple mnemonic/sketch hybrid which summarised the factors influencing tree species in the UK temperate forest biome (see figure 2).

Figure 2: A mnemonic/sketch hybrid which summarises the factors influencing tree species in the UK temperate forest biome

I then asked if any of them had tried to revise using podcasts, or had heard of older siblings or friends doing so.  A couple of hands went up.  (When I asked about YouTube videos, a couple more hands tentatively followed.)  So, after a short discussion, we had a theme – which I entitled the ‘Comprehension Comparison Challenge’ – and four approaches to compare: reading, writing, noting, and dual coding!

2. Methodology

I went around the class, asking one person to read, their neighbour to listen, the next person to make written notes only, and the next person to make a combination of sketches and notes.  Instructions were simple:

• Readers should not show the pages to the listeners, but could repeat content if requested to do so
• Listeners were encouraged to shut their eyes to focus their attention on the content
• The written notes and sketch/note combinations could be in any form that the students wanted

After about 12 minutes, the students were issued a 15-mark short answer test (on A5 paper) based on the textbook spread.  I read out the answers (eliciting responses via questioning the students) and students self-marked their test papers.

3. Results

Students called out their results and I filled in a basic Excel spreadsheet table (figure 3); I showed this process on the whiteboard.

Figure 3: Spreadsheet of marks

4. Presentation

The class swiftly agreed that a bar chart would be the best way to show this discrete data (figure 4).

Figure 4: Bar chart of results

5. Analysis

The top highest scoring categories were ‘noting’ and ‘dual coding’.  We analysed the size of the margins by which these two ‘won’ the challenge, why the two ‘winning’ methods might work, and why merely reading or listening may be less efficient approaches to learning – at least when carried out in isolation.  We briefly discussed the different types of ‘noting’, but time was beginning to run out at this point!

6. Conclusion

So, what worked?  I easily managed to get the feedback from the class that a combination of methods, focussing mainly on noting and dual coding, may well be the ‘winning ticket’ in terms of strategies to comprehend information.

Figure 5: Student example of dual coding

7. Evaluation

I will be perfectly honest and say that as the end of the lesson was swiftly approaching, I just said that this survey was an example of the kind of research carried out into learning but that it was unscientific in many respects.  I suggested to the students that they should consider combining notes and dual coding their preparations for future tests and examinations.  But in longer lessons – perhaps you have hour-long periods? – a fuller evaluation process would be achievable.

Reflections

I contend that letting students not only see ‘research in action’, but also helping them to design and take part in it, will give them the following benefits:

• They can see the immediate results of why some learning methods are more effective than others (again, I must stress the limitations of this very brief ‘experiment’)
•  They have more practice of the scientific method, which will help them in Geography and the sciences
• They might be more willing to try new ways of working
• On a short-term basis, the lesson was more interesting and I hope that the content sunk in (let’s see if it has in the next end of unit test on energy!)

I would love to have handed the conclusion and evaluation sections over to the students.  In longer lessons – perhaps you have hour-long periods? – a fuller evaluation process would be achievable.  Perhaps I will try it again in a double lesson with one of my A Level groups to give the students a fuller appreciation of the whole process.

I should also have allowed enough time to point out that the two ‘winning methods’ can’t be carried out once, but that knowledge of retrieval practice, spacing and self explanation (amongst other methods, as covered by Dunlosky et al, 2013) will be necessary to enhance the chances of longer term retention and application of information.  But effective studying and revision are covered at other times in my school, and as they begin to adopt the VESPA model, this should be covered more frequently and thoroughly.

Have you engaged your students in micro-experiments such as this, or even in more in-depth studies?  Get in touch!

References

Cordingley, P (2019) ‘Collaborative engagement in and with research: A central part of the CPD landscape’ in Scutt, C and Harrison, S: Teacher CPD: International trends, opportunities and challenges (pp138-143) – Chartered College of Teaching, London: https://my.chartered.college/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Chartered-College-International-Teacher-CPD-report.pdf (members-only, paywall)

Department for Education (2013) Geography programmes of study: key stage 3: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/239087/SECONDARY_national_curriculum_-_Geography.pdf

Dunlosky, J, Rawson, K, Marsh, E, Nathan, M and Willingham, D (2013) Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, vol. 14, 1: pp. 4-58: https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/rbtfl/Z10jaVH/60XQM/full

Modern life is increasingly complex, and so are the issues which students are expected to understand and expand upon.  Synopticity (the ability to draw threads together from a variety of sources) and flexible thinking are therefore increasingly valued skills both in education and in the wider world.

Our world no longer needs as many people who can remember vast amounts of information as it once did – as Yuval Noah Harari (2018) writes:

“In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.”

I would add to Harari’s insight that there is much greater value in those who can see more than one point of view than in those who are blinkered to only see their own.  I also believe that our fast- moving society is increasingly in need of people who are willing to change their mind in the face of facts.

Even when boiled down to the irksome necessities of the education system – examinations and other forms of external assessment – there is a need for candidates to be flexible in their thinking.  Writing as a Geography teacher and examiner, I know the value that exam boards place on the ability for candidates to ‘hold their ideas lightly’.

Holding ideas lightly

What do I take to be the meaning of this phrase?  I can sum it up as being willing to entertain a wide variety of ideas and being able to change one’s mind in the face of evidence.

Here are three illustrations where encouraging students to their ideas lightly has direct relevance to my secondary school Geography practice:

• At GCSE, Edexcel Paper 3 is People and Environment Issues – Making Geographical Decisions – and to reach the highest levels in the crux 16-mark question at the end, candidates must consider the strengths and weaknesses of their chosen option and those of two other options they rejected.
• Even in the apparently logical realm of multiple-choice questions, which appear at GCSE Geography, candidates need to be able to change their minds from what might at first be the more obvious choice(s).
• At A Level Geography, across all examination boards, up to 70% of the marks come from Assessment Objectives 2 and 3, which relate to interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and construction of arguments – see Figure 1:

Figure 1: AS and A Level Geography Assessment Objectives
Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/assessment-objectives-ancient-languages-geography-and-mfl/gcse-as-and-a-level-assessment-objectives#geography-1

I am not advocating ‘holding your ideas lightly’ as a justification for sitting on the fence – but rather as a bulwark simultaneously against rash ‘fast thinking’ and also against the stubbornness which holds back broader human progress.

So how could practitioners take on board this philosophy in their teaching?

Think twice, and think carefully

When faced with a multiple-choice question, contrary to much received thinking, candidates should be encouraged to think twice and think carefully, and not necessarily go with their first instinct.  The justification for this is can be found in this recent discussion from the FT’s ‘undercover economist’ Tim Harford.

A hands down winner

I have written on how to cope with the ‘forest of hands’ which is sometimes faced when students find a task difficult and they seek immediate help from a teacher.   But sometimes the ‘forest of hands’ springs up when a question is set and pupils rush to give their first idea that comes to their head.  To avoid this, many schools have adopted a ‘hands-down’ policy, which means that students must contemplate their response, so they have an equal chance of being picked by the teacher.  When combined with a chance to share their idea with a partner, and when told to be willing to change their response, a more reasoned discussion usually follows.

Scrap that!

Many students that I teach, across the KS3-5 spectrum, are wary or even unwilling to write their ideas down, even in the back of their books, for fear that they might ‘get it wrong’.  To overcome this, I often issue separate pieces of scrap paper or sticky notes (for later use in a ‘post it/pile it’ activity on a desk or a stretch of wall).  Another way is to use mini-whiteboard sets (complete with a board pen and a wipe), then students will be much more willing to write their ideas down and adjust them – especially if this is done in partnership with another student.  This idea is covered in more detail by my colleague Kerry Smith here. Ewan McIntosh has some more great ideas for low-tech ‘ideation’ (idea generation) on his website www.notosh.com .

Changing places

The outdoors can be a great place to generate ideas, discuss them, and even to jot them down.  Firstly, even apparently humdrum environments such as school playgrounds or parks can be inspiring and invigorating.  Secondly, it has been shown that some conversations flow more freely between passengers on car journeys thanks to ‘sideways listening’ – where both participants are facing forwards and are therefore less likely to hold back from what they want to say as the complications of eye contact and subliminal physical cues are largely absent – see Laurier et al (2010) and Mc Fadden (2017).  This philosophy can be transferred to outdoor learning, where students are paired and asked to complete a short and simple journey whilst discussing ideas with each other.  Thirdly, and related to the ‘scrap that!’ principle, why not issue students with chalks and get them to write down ideas, or have first sketches of art projects, on the playground – knowing that the best ideas can be shared and photographed but that the rain will one day come to wash away everyone’s jottings!

Computer aids

Figure 3: The Post-It Note app

There exists a wide range of ‘ideation’ apps and software, some of which allow users to write down ideas and shift them around (Post-It make an app which allows users to move virtual sticky notes around, change their colour, and merge them – thank you to Dominic Tremblay for drawing this to my attention).  Other websites allow users to write some words down, and then the programme will combine them with others to create almost endless outcomes.  Many of these will be ridiculous, but as Ewan McIntosh Pointed out in a session at Practical Pedagogies (2016), sometimes students will need to go through dozens, or even a hundred or so, iterations of ideas before hitting on the right one for them.  This could be in the realm of coming up with a title for an independent investigation, an Extended Project, or a theme for Design and Technology.  Ewan’s website No Tosh has a section called ‘The LAB’, which helpfully provides links to help you and your students ‘play around with ideas’.  Other idea generation methods can be found here.

Social media literacy

Chat rooms, comment pages, Twitter threads, online forums and so on are often used to share and generate ideas – but students should be urged to use them with care, as often the most outspoken users are those with the most extreme and hard-set ideas.  The well-publicised ‘echo chamber’ and ‘filter bubble’ effects should also be discussed with students.  One idea that could be tried with older and more internet-savvy students is to engage individual forum users with differing views from them in a moderate discussion.  I have tried this myself after reading some comments posted on Twitter following David Attenborough’s ‘Climate Change – the Facts’ documentary – and with the right approach, common ground can be found.

Discussion forums

Pupil councils, tutor periods, debating societies and other more innovative forums could be utilised by practitioners to enable students to air, discuss, and test out their opinions.  Going the full hog, whole-year or whole-school ‘deliberation days’ could be trialled, much like those promoted by Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin (2005) . (I have written more about this here.)

Light by name, serious by intent

In a fast-moving age where extreme views are easily accessed, media and news literacy are crucial, and where flexible thinking is needed in industry and in society, it would make sense to ‘hold your ideas lightly’ – and to encourage your students to do so too.

References

Ackerman, B. and Fishkin, J. (2005) Deliberation Day (Yale)

Harari, YN (2018) ‘Yuval Noah Harari on what the year 2050 has in store for humankind’ – Wired, 12 August 2018 (accessed 17 May 2019): https://www.wired.co.uk/article/yuval-noah-harari-extract-21-lessons-for-the-21st-century

Harford, T (2019) ‘Our first instinct is far too often wrong’ – Financial Times, 10 May 2019 (accessed 17 May 2019): https://www.ft.com/content/32e4b22e-7197-11e9-bbfb-5c68069fbd15

Eric Laurier, Hayden Lorimer, Barry Brown, Owain Jones, Oskar Juhlin, Allyson Noble, Mark Perry, Daniele Pica, Philippe Sormani, Ignaz Strebel, Laurel Swan, Alex S. Taylor, Laura Watts & Alexandra Weilenmann (2008) Driving and ‘Passengering’: Notes on the Ordinary Organization of Car Travel, Mobilities, 3:1, 1-23, DOI: 10.1080/17450100701797273

McFadden, J (2017) ‘The power of talking sideways to children’ – The Guardian, 14 January 2017 (accessed 17 May 2019): https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jan/14/children-parents-talk-opportunities-sideways-listening-chats

Further reading
Barrett, T (2015) ‘Hold your ideas lightly’ in Tom Barrett’s Blog, 10 February 2015 (accessed 17 May 2019): http://edte.ch/blog/2015/02/10/hold-your-ideas-lightly/

Coutts, N (2016) ‘Hold your ideas lightly’ in The Learner’s Way, 21 February 2016 (accessed 17 May 2019): https://thelearnersway.net/ideas/2016/2/21/hold-your-ideas-lightly

Students playing their own health and development game

Source: Author

With nine minutes to go until my Year 9 class arrived, I tried to get my Year 13 students to pack up prior to a plenary activity, but they did not want to finish the activity which they had been working on for well over an hour.

What was this activity?  A video?  A past paper question just prior to a report?  No – it was a board game – in fact it was the third one that they had made themselves.  They were all genuinely keen to learn!  So I let them play the game.

The Last Straw

Sometimes, it’s a struggle to think how I can bring the requirements of specifications to life.  In this case, I needed to convey the relationship between development and health in the UK, Brazil, and amongst Aboriginal Australians*.  Hmmm.  As it happens, a few years ago, I was lucky to have attended a Teachers’ Workshop at Leeds University, led by Myles Gould (@Myles_Gould_UoL), during which he introduced ‘The Last Straw – a board game on the social determinants of health’.  This can be purchased here: www.thelaststraw.ca

The Last Straw board game

Source: http://www.thelaststraw.ca 

It’s not the most exciting title, I admit, but I have played it over a dozen times with different groups over the years, and it works – it always generates a discussion on the complexities of public health.  The game is set in Canada, and in almost all respects, the scenarios are like those encountered in the UK.  It has stood the test of time, and indeed it provides a good basis for discussions about how public health challenges have changed over the past decade (some for the better and some for the worse, but, wearing my ‘optimist’ hat, more for the better, I would argue!).

Playing The Last Straw

The game comes with detailed instructions, but here is an outline: The facilitator splits the students into up to four groups, and each one is issued with a ‘character card’.  They roll dice to determine the socio-economic status, gender and ethnic background of their character.  Once these have been set, they are issued ‘vitality chips’ to represent their level of health – for example, males get ten chips and females get nine.  This provides the first of many opportunities in the game to discuss why there are health inequalities – and indeed, whether some of them have changed since the game was made a decade ago, and how some may differ in different countries.  At this point it is best to mention that there will be sensitive scenarios in the game, some of which may apply to players in the room or their close acquaintances, and that mutual respect would be appreciated.

Then the players proceed around the board, encountering individual scenarios (e.g. rolling a dice to decide if they try drugs) or community scenarios (e.g. ‘the government provides funding for pre-school care’).  For every scenario, the player risks losing or gaining ‘vitality’ chips.  There are also three staging posts – adolescence, adulthood, and old age – when dice are again rolled to determine whether, for example, the educational level of the character changes.  Discussions are always encouraged, and sometimes, mini quizzes are set – such as when all present are rewarded with a vitality chip if they can collectively think of some ways to overcome a public health challenge – e.g. ways to stop smoking.

Taking it further

Students designing their own health and development game

Source: Author

This worked well – but I decided to build on the game and ask students to design their own.  They did this in small teams – one group made a game for the UK case study, another made one for Brazil, and the last group made one for Aboriginal Australians.  I made a smaller playing board but asked the students to retain the mixture of initial life chances, individual scenarios and community scenarios.  The students then took it in turn to play these games (I became a participant too, although I also corrected any factual inaccuracies and stimulated further discussion points during the games).  These were the games that the group were determined to play up to and beyond the end of the lesson.

Other games

Other games I have played in Geography are include:

• The banana game – a simple, one lesson wonder to get students to consider where the money they pay for their goods goes – from CAFOD: https://cafod.org.uk/Education/Primary-teaching-resources/Fairtrade
• The trading game – students create shapes and trade them and the raw materials needed to make them – from Christian Aid: https://www.christianaid.org.uk/schools/trading-game
• The Darfur game – some characters make it to the supposed sanctuary of the internally displaced persons camp, but there are challenges there too – from the RGS: https://www.rgs.org/schools/teaching-resources/the-geography-of-conflict/the-causes-of-conflict/
• The game of Indian life – students start off as poor rural citizens and some move to the city, where some thrive, and others don’t (I can’t find this source – please contact me if you created this!)

Justifications for using games in teaching

I recommend the judicious use of games in teaching, and especially recommend the practice of students making their own games, for these reasons (among many others!):

• Students engage with the topic in both the playing of, and the creation of, the games
• Games encourage students to modify case study content, not just regurgitate it
• They allow teachers to develop plenty of ‘primed’ discussions where the seed of a situation is planted**, rather than ‘blank slate’ discussions where students are asked to think on their feet

Take care!

Games should be used carefully, and here are some factors which should be considered:

• The size of the class
• The behaviour of the class
• Time of day, day of the week, and time within the term: some of the more active ones can work well when children might be less receptive to more settled tasks, but others, such as the Last Straw, require more deliberation and discussion
• The time available – for example, the activities covered above took longer than the time I would normally take to cover the bare bones of the content.  However, the listening, processing, and deliberative skills developed by playing The Last Straw and the three spin-off games justified the time devoted to them
• The time taken by the teacher to prepare for each game (this is a great opportunity for spreading the workload around colleagues!)
• Whether or not the players need to take notes, and if so, in which format, and when – during, or after the game?  In my experience, such reflections can work as a homework task
• Follow-up activities – this could be a written reflection, or it could be a sample examination question – this is what I will be giving my group after playing The Last Straw

Finally, each of these games requires contextualisation and on-the-spot willingness on behalf of the teacher to be flexible.  It is also worth mentioning that the seriousness of the subject matter of each game should be considered – they represent real life scenarios.  I still wince when I remember playing a board game created by a fellow PGCE Geography student 18 years ago – he called his game ‘Bangladesh bingo’, and the first player who successfully ticked off the impacts of a flooding event, such as ‘a cholera outbreak kills thousands’, had to stand up and celebrate by shouting out ‘floodtastic!’.

Final thoughts…

Has anyone come across a climate change – or ‘sustainable futures’ board game of the same level of complexity as The Last Straw?  I was thinking that one day, I could make a board game!

David

* For the Edexcel A Level ‘Health, Human Rights and Intervention’ module.

** Such as ‘You lost one vitality chip for contracting an STD, but two for the anxiety resulting from being bullied – is this a fair representation of the relative seriousness of these two events, and indeed what is your opinion of the importance of physical versus mental challenges to health?’