FOSIL through Geography investigation projects

[Hannah Campion Participant]

I’m currently working on an inquiry in Year 9 Geography on Tourism.  I’m using an existing investigation as my starting point and I thought it might be useful to others who are adapting materials using FOSIL to show how key skills needed in Geography for GCSE and beyond can be integrated through project work. I will be supporting developmental work for year 9 through the year as part of their year 9 FOSIL project and the Geography Tourism project will be the accumulation that will assess the FOSIL skills developed by year 9 pupils.

Collaboration with the library team and other teachers will be important as I help to create resources in a more familiar way to ensure pupils can transfer their learning and skills developed through year 9 project into Geography inquiry project.

More to follow very soon…

[Elizabeth Hutchinson Participant]

Hi Hannah, not to blur the edges of FOSIL but with Geography projects, have you ever used mystery hangouts as a research tool?  It increases engagement and adds collaboration outside school via Google Hangouts. I wrote a blog about some of the tools we use to help students connect it includes a little about hangout too https://www.elizabethahutchinson.com/post/4-online-tools-used-to-engage-teachers-in-collaboration-and-information-literacy. I hope this is useful and if you want to know more just ask. Elizabeth

[Chris Foster Participant]

One thing that has become increasingly apparent in our work with sixth form (Year 12 and 13) students is that they often don’t see diagrams, images and maps as sources that require citing and referencing.  It’s an issue we are addressing in our EE and EPQ training for pupils and supervisors, but as we know from the FOSIL framework, skills are best built up and developed over time.  If we want pupils to use this skill in the sixth form, we need to address it earlier in school.  This Form 3 project in Geography presents us with an excellent opportunity to start working on the skills needed to cite and reference images.  Something for us to bear in mind as we develop the resources, Hannah.

[Chris Foster Participant]

Hi Hannah.  I wonder if some of the tools we have developed for the Form 3 Individual Project might be adapted to fit in this Geography inquiry?  In particular, the Investigative Journal and the evaluation in the reflection stage?  I’m sure you can think of some specific issues in F3 Geography that we might address, in addition to giving the pupils more practice with citing and referencing.

[Hannah Campion Participant]

Hi Chris, Thank you for your time and advice the resources you have shared. I will look to adapt it for use in my Tourism inquiry. The reflection tool to help pupils review their work to improve it will be helpful.  In particular, an aim is to help them practice how to properly reference their work and explain their ideas  so this looks perfect for my inquiry aims.  Your template for an investigative journal is something that I will also try out for our data collection section of the inquiry to help develop secondary data research. When drafted I will add examples of how I have used your tool kit

[Chris Foster Participant]

Excellent!  I look forward to seeing how the project develops!

[Lucy Breag Participant]

Having put together a revised Tourism project based on the Year 9 (Form 3) Individual Project inquiry journals, Hannah asked us to have a look through what she had done, to check that the tasks made sense in relation to the FOSIL stages and to make the documents look as familiar to the pupils as possible.  This year group has worked through a number of FOSIL inquiries so far this year – Inquiry Skills, Computer Science, Individual Project and History – so they are becoming relatively proficient users of material developed based upon the FOSIL cycle.  We work hard to try to ensure that familiarity leads to better usage rather than to complacency but with teenagers of this age, this is not always easy!  I look forward to seeing how this material works now that pupils will not be heading off to Hunstanton and Skegness (not physically anyway), and really hope that delivering the inquiry remotely shows FOSIL off to its best advantage.  Many of the changes made to the Inquiry Skills Project last autumn (citing images and maps, for example) were made in order to benefit this Geography project, so fingers crossed they prove their worth.

The inquiry journal can be downloaded here.

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