Well your wrong, it was taken right in the middle on Manhattan just last week and not in Central Park. It was taken on New York’s newest tourist attraction, the High Line which runs from the Meatpacking District (Gansevoot), through the Art Gallery District and finishes in Midtown (11th Av and 25th Street). The project has turned an abandoned railway line into a designated park space filled with grasses, trees and some open picnic spaces. The series of pictures below shows the park and its surroundings, it makes for quite a unique location.

I read about the High Line 2 weeks before my trip to New York and was really interested by this clever and unique use of public space. Firstly, along the High Line is a smattering of market stalls selling sustainable produce and locally grown and sources items, many of which claim to have been sourced on Manhattan itself. In the place so obsessed with mass production and economies of scale it was refreshing to see tiny independent retailers selling genuine local items.

However, the High Line has done more than just add a small open space and sustainability to New York it was clear to me that it is being used to try and regenerate an area of some urban decay. At its farthest point south the High Line runs through what seems a reasonably affluent area with the Meatpacking District having a range of high end shops and expensive apartments (for reference this is where Friends was set). However as you walk north along the park the apartments around the line decline in quality until you reach the area furthest north, near the bus depot and Madison Square Garden, not famously a high end part of New York. In this area the High Line is being used as a selling point for a range of new properties which are quickly being put up. Alongside the park were several clearly brand new blocks of apartments, as yet with nobody living in them and several more being built. All of them were adorned with huge signs advertising the properties fantastic view of the High Line, not their view of the skyline of Manhattan. Clearly this is a new USP for these properties as it is unlikely that they would of been advertising a view of an abandoned railway line.  These new properties seemed much larger and modern than those around them and would clearly fetch a much higher asking price and therefore a higher earning tenant, increasing income levels and reducing deprivation levels in this area.

The High Line was an excellent new attraction to visit and whilst it remains to be seen if it has any impact on the area it certainly seemed popular with tourists and New Yorkers alike. Well worth a visit.

Prior to the Olympic bid Stratford was one of London’s more deprived areas, not a no go zone by any means but unemployment rates were high income was low, housing quality was pretty poor etc. The case study lends itself well to both GCSE and A-Level specs as a lot is being done to ensure the sustainability of these games and clearly the current exam specs have a real focus on sustainability. The world marvelled in 2008 when the games went to China at the impressive show put on in Beijing but the feeling was that the games in London needed not just to impress but to leave a legacy. The stadiums in China will, in all likelihood, turn into white elephants in the future, seldom seeing use and slowly rotting away. Unfortunately this is the case with a number of events which have preceded it, with the Montreal,  Atlanta and Athens stadiums all being victim of this fate and the 2010 world cup stadiums in South Africa already falling into some state of disrepair. The exception to this doom which has followed after Olympics is Sydney where the games were planned with sustainability in mind, the result is that the venues continue to make money and create jobs for the people. London therefore used the success of Sydney to model their ideas on and tried to adapt as many of the good ideas from those games as possible (I use information on the success of Sydney as a starting point for my GCSE and A-level lessons – which ideas could work for London).

An example of the typical housing and tower blocks in Stratford with stadium behind

With that in mind the London games looks to be sustainable in 3 ways, economic, environment and social. The main aim for the venues is to provide income for the next hundred years. However the capacity for the venues was considered to be too great for events following the Olympics and so the major stadiums were all designed to be partly dismantled after the Olympics to create smaller venues which can be more regularly used. Notably the main athletics stadium is to be reduced from a capacity around 65,000 to nearer 30,000 and will become the home of West Ham football team (although Spurs are doing their best to prevent that from happening). This should create thousands of permanent full and part time jobs in the area and this should help to provide a better economic situation in Stratford as the multiplier effect kicks in and local businesses benefit from higher rates of employment and increased tourists and visitors. A major issue for the games was the environment and so a vast area of parkland has been created around the area to offset the damage created by the stadiums. Local waterways, much of which have suffered with environmental pollution, have also been improved to encourage wildlife back into the area. Certainly on out visit we saw evidence of this with canals far from the stadiums looking to have oil and other deposits on the surface and lots of rubbish floating around, whereas waterways nearer the games were cleaner, with green algae floating on the surface and resurfaced towpath’s. The games also wanted to create the minimal carbon footprint possible and this is to be achieved by retailers within the park selling food and drink in biodegradable containers and supplies will be sourced from local producers wherever possible to keep air miles etc to a minimum. To ensure social sustainability the games is looking to not disrupt and hopefully improve the day to day lives of those in the area. Previous games, notably Barcelona, have brought the host city to a standstill during the event and London was keen for this not to happen. To ensure this, public transport in the area has been greatly improved, an infrastructure which will clearly last well beyond the games, and public transport costs have been reduced for those with tickets to events to try to encourage most people to travel to the games by train and not by car. Additionally the athletes village will be converted into affordable homes after the games many of which will be set aside for those in ‘key’ occupations such as nurses and teachers. 

So what has been the impact of all these developments? Well clearly the true impact will only be realised in the years after the games have happened, but already Stratford show signs of improvement. Beyond the Westfield shopping centre, residential developments like the one below have begun to spring up in the area, with the whole Stratford area looking like a construction site at present with high end residential and commercial properties appearing. Indeed the architect I spoke to on our visit was saying how the area was now experiencing an influx of higher earners and city types and with that bars and cafe’s in the area were profiting from new customers with higher incomes. So clearly even with a year to go before the games, many people in the area are beginning to benefit from the changes.

An example of the sort of modern development taking place in Stratford

However, clearly the problem like with many urban redevelopments is what has become of the people who previously lived in the area who are no longer able to afford the rents being charged by landlords. Well, i didnt take us long to find out that what is being done in nothing. On our way out of Stratford we stopped at a McDonalds, located a stones throw from the stadium, and sat outside was a group of ‘hoodies’ in their late teens and early twenties. Perhaps not very wisely I decided to talk to them about what impacts the developments were having on them. All of them agreed through some conversation that the improvements did nothing to improve their lives with one or two commenting that lower income jobs were now harder to find in the area (especially part time jobs for teenagers) and council housing was in short supply as many tower blocks were being shut down and demolished to make way for new developments. Simply put, many of the poorer residents of Stratford are being marginalised, losing work and having to leave the area.

Clearly this example is more complex than I could ever outline in a blog post and this serves as just a simple outline of what is taking place there. Hopefully this will help some people feel a little more informed when teaching this case study or simply debating the concept of redevelopment or gentrification. If anybody would like any of the resources I use for teaching this at A-Level or GCSE please feel free to email me at markhowell101@googlemail.com.

As ever thankyou for reading.

Initially the signs for this group were not so great, in terms of both work ethic in year 10 and in terms of ability they are just slightly below my previous group and so I had expected their results in the controlled assessment and DME to be slightly worse. However the DME results were reasonable and after 2 months of hard work on DME’s the results in January were outstanding (40% A* and A and only 4 resits needed, will take that any day) so I am hopeful that this performance will continue into the January exam. We also worked hard on the final aspects of the course through the last 2 terms and did a lot of really productive revision.

I hope the results are good as almost half of them are looking to continue Geography on at AS Level and I feel like they deserve to do well. Its also not often I say this but I feel like I deserve a good set of results too, I feel like I got my teaching just right for this group over the 2 years and have really maximised their knowledge, understanding and exam know how. This was confirmed to me in the last week of term when I received notification that my GCSE group had nominated me for a national teaching award. Whilst I was so pleased with this it means nothing if the results are not good.

My first impression of the exam was relief. It had been my belief throughout most of these 2 years that the format would allow students to choose between questions on rivers and questions on coast, between questions on population and questions on settlement and between questions on climatic hazards and questions on tectonic hazards. Having taught population and settlement and tectonics and climatic in equal measure this gave my students the opportunity to choose the easier set of questions or the ones which suited them better. However, due to doing our controlled assessment on coasts we had spent roughly twice as much time on this topic than we spent on rivers. I had thus suggested strongly that my students should answer the coasts questions. Clearly the nature of always doing the coasts controlled assessment means my students will always favour this over rivers, however, I learned late on in the process from a colleague that OCR had told them that the board reserved the right to set 2 of the same type of questions and I therefore spent a lot of time working on rivers stuff in the run up to the exam. It makes sense for the board to do this to stop unscrupulous teachers just teaching half the course in lots of detail and directing students towards only the questions they have studied. That said I think it is unlikely that they would ever do this simply because it would polarize results. By setting only rivers questions they potentially put at a disadvantage all those who did human or coastal controlled assessments. Only by setting questions on rivers, coasts, population and settlement do they ensure that all students have a fair crack at the area they have spent probably most time on and have experienced fieldwork it.

The exam turned out as I initially thought with a question on each of the 6 topics included (with questions of tectonics and climatic hazards, population and settlement and rivers and coasts kept apart) but I will not bank on this every year, making sure my students are prepared for every eventuality.

The first section got students to choose between rivers and coasts with similar questions set for both (incidentally all 32 of my students did rivers). The opening questions on both disciplines were fairly standard map reading and interpretation exercises for up to 4 marks. I think it is very likely that the map skills will be a fixture of the rivers and coasts section in future papers and will make sure that students can identify some river / coasts features on maps in future (obviously this can’t be the case in 2012 as rivers and coasts are the DME options and will not be in the exam). Both sets of questions also featured a 4 marks describe with the aid of a diagram question where students had to explain a features origin, again fairly standard. The coasts case study was fairly predictable for me as students have covered the natural features of a coastline in their C/A and I therefore was confident that management would be the topic of the exam case study. I would anticipate that this will be the case in the majority of years that the terminal exam will ask the opposing question to the question set in the C/A and will therefore alternate annually. I was glad my students were doing coasts as I felt the rivers case study was tricky. In the spec students are asked to know about 2 case studies of flooding (MEDC and LEDC), understanding 3 things about each: the causes, consequences and management. In the specimen papers and practice questions the case studies had always asked for 2 out of the 3 aspects, for example causes and management and so I felt it was tricky to expect students to respond to just 1 of the 3 elements, in this case the management. Something to consider in future.

On balance I felt the human questions were the most straightforward with half being on population (pop pyramids, changes in pop, links between development and pop, ageing pop and pop management) and the other half being on settlement (urbanisation, squatter settlements, counter-urbanisation and changes to retail provision). My students almost all answered the population question on the basis that we had a couple of pretty memorable case studies they could use for the long question. Students felt that both sets of questions were pretty reasonable and straightforward with no surprises. This was a relief as there were no pop and settle questions on the specimen paper provided and neither were there any on last years short course paper as these topics are not in the short course. At least now we have some questions to use as mocks and in class tests which look like the real thing. I am torn on whether to expect pop and settle to be separate every year as the topics do cross over more than the physical ones and it would be pretty reasonable to mix up the questions. That said both topics are controlled assessment options and therefore students doing human fieldwork ought to have the same opportunity to attempt questions on their area of most knowledge.

The third section covered the 2 natural hazards options and again this was split as expected with the first set on climatic hazards (specifically drought) and the second set on tectonics (volcanoes). My students mostly opted for the questions on volcanoes but most felt they would have been ok to answer the drought questions without any trouble. There were no specific questions on earthquakes or tropical storms, although case studies were open so that students could use case studies of these hazards if they wanted to. It remains to be seen whether the exams will always focus on one of the hazards in each category or whether in future they might look to mix up questions on say droughts and tropical storms or even droughts and earthquakes for example.

Overall I was pleased with the exam and really pleased that I seem to have gone about teaching and assessing the course over the 2 years in a way which prepared the students well for the final exam. Hopefully the results will be what I expect in August.

Revision season has therefore been hard for me in both PGCE and NQT years as I have struggled to help students revise in the best way possible. To expect them to revise in the way I did for uni would not be appropriate for many of them but I want to find a way to get them all doing something. Thankfully one success has been the podcasts which all of my classes have downloaded (new Manor Geog Pod on the way) and all have listened to which if January’s results for me were anything to go by this has been a good result. My struggles have come in class with trying to create a focussed environment where students revise the right sort of things and can improve exam technique without it being too dry which might switch some students off altogether.

This was my problem last year where with the majority of classes I encouraged students to sit and read through notes or text books in close to silence and threw occasional past papers at them. Whilst this worked for some, a great number did not gain a great deal from this and though my results were good last year I felt this was not as a result of the 2 or 3 weeks before the exam in which I felt learning had not been maximised.

This year I feel much more positive about the experience and hopefully the results in August will affirm my higher expectations. With all of my exam groups I have 100 minute lessons which allow me to do a few tasks. I have been starting each lesson with a pub quiz style quick fire questions on a part of the course spec (I teach on the AQA B Religious Studies SPEC, AQA Geography A-level and OCR B Geography GCSE spec) then depending on what questions students answer badly they then attempt different revision tasks. So for example if they did badly at questions 1 to 5 they do the population revision task I have set and if they do badly at questions 6-10 they do the settlement revision task. This quiz style intro to lessons has been really fun with prizes and a nice relaxed end of the year kind of feel, a nice break from a lot of the heavy revision I know is going on elsewhere. It takes maybe 20-30 minutes out of my 100 and I then get them doing a revision task for the middle 30-45 minutes. This I make sure is more focussed and addresses areas which have been identified as weaknesses in the quiz. The final half hour or so is given over to exam practice where I set prior exam questions and they answer in timed, exam conditions. We then peer assess these at the end with students reading out answers and us discussing the marking of them.

This method for me has been head and shoulders better than last years approach and I can really see their exam answers improving lesson by lesson. For me they have been a lot more focussed and gained more in the 45 minutes or so directed revision time this year than 100 minutes of unstructured stuff last year. Hopefully the results will show this improved approach and then I can use this method for future years. Lets just hope it doesnt take me as long to find a method that works in the class as it took for me to find a personal method that worked.

Now marking assessments and tests and coursework I don’t mind as I genuinely enjoy assessing work and trying to make a case for a student getting a C instead of a D or seeing a key stage 3 student suddenly show a big improvement in their understanding. I also find it easy to focus on this kind of marking and find it easy to offer feedback on how students can improve as its simply a case of thinking how can they take it to the next level. I also do a lot of peer and self assessing and I am aware that is really good practice when done well which I do. This does mean that there is less to mark for me when I take books in for marking (all books are marked in a 2 week cycle at my school)

However, the problem for me is marking books. This year my school has made a big thing out of marking (it was an area which let us down during last OFSTED and with another approaching they want it fixed) and this has meant a number of scrutinise of our practice. Whilst I have done ok in these scrutinise it is clear to me that this is an aspect of my practice which needs improving when compared to many other elements of being a teacher.

Firstly, I do struggle to keep up with a 2 week marking cycle. Whilst I don’t slip miles from that, if I am honest I am probably nearer a 3 week rotation. I find the problem comes when trying to take in books around setting homework or revision for tests or work to be completed at home and then taking books in when you don’t see the class for a couple of days and you have a couple of free evenings. All this makes it difficult to keep with the cycle.

My second problem is my focus when marking books. I used to mark whilst having the TV or music on and whilst this made it less of a chore I was very easily distracted by these things. When I have a stack of 32 books all saying more or less the same thing I will openly admit that it can become quite tedious and I look for distractions (like writing this blog). I have tried to break it down and do ten at a time but then the problem is often you can’t get a class set done in a night.

My final problem is what to write. As previously stated I am ok at informing students on how to improve assessments but in everyday classwork I find it difficult beyond making statements about presentation or completion of tasks set. This means that a student who does complete all work and the book is neat will often not get any comments beyond well done.

Now at the start of this blog I said that I was happy to keep working at aspects of my practice where I can see that improvement would pay dividends. However with marking I sometimes struggle to see what I am aiming for by continue to try to improve my practice. Partly because I think that 80% of students don’t read everyday comments (they look at grades and assessment feedback but not sure they always read your day to day marking) and partly because the only way to improve would be to spend more time marking books. As previously discussed in this blog I spend a lot of time planning lessons (I think more than the average teacher) to ensure that they are all high quality and I already feel like during term time I am pretty much maxed out with school work and struggle to keep a life balance at times. Therefore to improve my marking I believe the quality of my lessons would suffer and that is not a price I have been willing to pay so far.

Having said all that I would love to improve and would really value the advice of anyone on how to improve my everyday marking and keep up with a 2 week rotation without spending lots and lots more time doing it and without losing the will to live through boredom.

It was therefore decided that our assessments and therefore our schemes of work needed changing over the summer to include enquiry assessments and lessons which help develop enquiry skills and techniques. For me the biggest challenge was trying to give students the idea of what an enquiry was and how to put one together. I took my 2 year 9 groups as a sample of how to deliver this idea, believing them to be a good basis to build from as I teach top and bottom set. With both groups I spent one lesson at the start of the process exploring what an enquiry was using this excellent blog as the basis for these lessons. http://geodonn.posterous.com/for-markhowell101-headbutts-and-geographical.

Students used this video to establish a grounding of what an enquiry question was, what research needed to be done to reach a conclusion and we began to evaluate the quality of different research (video evidence, interviewing riders etc). At key stage 3 students can achieve a decent level by creating a good enquiry question, doing relevent research and reaching a valid conclusion. If they can begin to evaluate the evidence they start to push level 7 so for me the discussion of this video delivered all the concepts required even for the bottom set group who were even starting to display some level 7 evaluation skills.  A colleague of mine who watches a lot of rugby said she effectively delivered this lesson using the rugby bloodgate enquiry so pick something you know about and this should work.

From here I gave them a limited amount of background info about 2 earthquakes from 2010, Haiti and Chile and students started to generate their own enquiry questions (typically they came up with why did Haiti kill more people whilst Chile was more powerful on the Richter scale?). They then had to break that question apart into the various aspects that they would need to research in order to reach a valid conclusion. Again both groups were able to do this effectively although of course the lower ability needed more guidance on suitable questions and lines of enquiry.

To make an effective enquiry you will of course then need to allow to for them to openly research and this needs to be done ideally in a computer suite although it can be done at home but inevitably this leads to varying outcomes in terms of quantity and quality of research as is typical of homework. My colleague could not get access to computer so had to do hers this way and the outcomes for some students suffered due to lack of time spent on homework, perhaps they have learned for next time and the more important GCSE enquiry.

Finally I allowed time to write the assessment up in whatever format they chose, again in preparation for GCSE. Some whilst most chose a report style some chose powerpoints and others even enquired as to whether websites or podcasts were possible but time constraints meant this was difficult.

The outcome for both me and my colleague (not a geog specialist) was very good grades across 3 groups using this process. The key stage 3 curriculum levels means that if students understand what an enquiry requires they can easily access high level 6 and low level 7 if they are an able student. Hopefully in the long term the outcome is even more favourable and I hope that in 2 years my year 11′s will have a better idea of what is expected of them in a GCSE enquiry.

All this coverage meant that even as early as Friday this was all my students wanted to talk about. I am currently not teaching tectonics with any of my classes, having recently finished with year 9 and am about to start with both y10 and 11 but it seems to make sense to me and many other teachers I have spoken to strike while the iron is hot and deal with this while the students are impassioned about it. I therefore dropped 20 minutes from my lessons on Friday and will do so again on Monday to tackle what is going on in Japan. Issues as great as this I think are so significant that we should be able to float them into the curriculum and just step back from whatever is being done even if it is just for 20 minutes.

However, in the immediate hours after the event it is difficult to know how to resource a lesson on an event such as this for many reasons. Although clearly in the years that follow this will become a case study for many text books and revision guides, right now it seems senseless to trivialize it in this way. I decided the best approach was not to have them produce work of any kind but simply just to discuss what was going on. I of course opened up with revision on tectonics and we looked at the specifics of how this event was caused. This was followed by looking at video footage and images of Japan and discussing the scenes and issues which came out of this. The understanding of the causes and consequences and management of this event among the students was on a level you could never expect from teaching a cold and unknown to them case study. They engaged in a very high level conversation and strong differences of opinion emerged on how we should manage and recover from events like this. This contrasts greatly with teaching normal case studies where students need to learn facts about the event in order to answer exam questions.

Whilst you can never of course plan a floating curriculum, the ability to be flexible and teach reactionary and relevent issues creates some of the best learning I have experienced in quite a while. At technology improves our immediate coverage of global events such as this will improve and speed up and this will enable us to teach issues as soon as they arise. The students live in an age of immediacy where information spreads very quickly and interests seem to fade equally quickly, I think it is important that we as teachers do just a little to capitalise on their sometimes passing interests.

My thoughts of course go out to anyone who has been affected by these disasters and from the conversations I had on Friday the students of East Northamptonshire are thinking of you too.