The Global Classroom
Written by Andrew Nelson
After attending an AGS Inspire session on global collaboration, I found the inspiration to search for a class in the USA to collaborate with on our upcoming Tornadoes topic in Geography. I got in touch with Blake via a contact I made during the training session, who recommended Blake because he was a meteorologist and fellow Geography teacher who lives in Tornado Alley.
During their initial chats, we agreed that the students from the UK would send pre prepared questions to the students in America for the students to plan and prepare their answers. My students in the UK looked at a specific exam question that they would be facing in the near future and prepared 15 questions. This alone was an excellent lesson as the students looked at ways to ask good questions – a key skill in today’s world. Blake commented on how good the questions were, how much his class enjoyed answering them and how his class were stretched and challenged by each question.
What Happened?
On the day itself, each student asked their pre prepared question and the American students answered the questions using their own authentic experience of living in Tornado Alley. The buzz in the room was electric and each and every student was completely transfixed, scribbling the answers from Kansas down. Standing at the front of the class and just talking about Tornadoes would quite simply never have the same effect. It was an amazing learning experience in which every student learned something new. One of the goals for the lesson was for the students to find out about how Tornadoes impact on people economically. As you could imagine it is easy to infer the obvious costs – houses being destroyed, cars lost etc – but the students found out that in America, health care is private and chargeable. The class were quite shocked to find out that every resident affected by the tornado and who needed an ambulance, had to pay $200 for the ambulance to take them to hospital! This made it all very real and a quite authentic experience that you would struggle to find in any textbook.
What was the impact on student learning?
The opportunity to collaborate with fellow students across the world increased the motivation of the students significantly. Student comments included “that was amazing!”, “that was epic, Sir” and best of all “can we do that again?”!
But the big question was – how much progress did the class make? My class followed up the lesson with a research lesson on the Greensburg Tornado of 2013. This tornado was the tornado mentioned most by the students in Kansas and has since become a tornado case study for the class. Once the students wrote their assessment (which looked at how tornadoes effect the environment and people), the results and the impact of the global collaboration was simply incredible. All of the students either matched or superseded their end of year target (6 months early), with some students outperforming their targets on this project significantly.
