As the 2012-13 school year comes to a close, teachers will be deciding what they should include in next year's curriculum. In this post, curriculum leader for Geography David Rogers describes a five-step method he implemented in his school which gave students in Years 7 to 9 the opportunity to decide for themselves what makes a 'perfect lesson' and then write their ideas onto the schemes of work in Google Docs. In this way, students can effectively - and lawfully - 'hack' their curriculum!

Lots of schools and teachers bang on about giving students a voice, but very few actually allow them to have one. At Priory Geography, we have developed a strong culture of allowing young people to get involved in making decisions about school life, for example:

• The Space Explorers, Space Creators Building Schools of the Future Project supported by a 21st Century Learning Alliance Fellowship;
• Choosing our GCSE Specification during the last round of GCSE ‘reform’, and;
• Creating the Mobile Learning Policy for Priory School.

This is a ‘how to’ post that was inspired by this post over at Noel Jenkins’ excellent Digital Geography. This in turn led me to another useful and creative blog by Paul Bogush and this post on creating RSA Style animation videos with the class. If you want to know how to do it properly, I recommend that you head over to Noel and Paul’s posts first.

This post is the story of how a class of Year 10 Geography students got on with the challenge. Before I start, it’s worth looking at how the experts do it:

During the development unit, I wanted time to really explore the idea of the factors that affect the economic development of countries. In particular, I’ve always struggled to get students to link these factors together. After some of the more traditional lessons, I decided to give this a try. In the end, it took 3 ‘double lessons’, so 6 hours in total.

Yesterday Priory Geography got back from the FSC’s Juniper Hall, a residential field centre near Dorking. The Ernest Cook Trust supported this year’s venture, allowing us to provide bursaries for students. The Eco Challenge (as it’s become known) is all about getting urban children out into rural areas, using traditional skills and exploring conservation techniques that can be used back home.

Part of the project involved live blogging from the field. The set up required: