Recently, we held a webinar on Cambridge International AS & A Level Global Perspectives & Research, focusing on common problems and solutions for teachers in the classroom. We were joined by David Towsey, who is a Head of Learning at Crawley College and an experienced teacher and educational consultant. Lots of teachers from around the world attended, and we ended each webinar with a really good discussion of questions they raised. Unfortunately, we did not have enough time to get to everyone, so David shares his answers in the blog below.
One of the best aspects of Cambridge Global Perspectives™ is the flexibility you have as a teacher to select different topics and to move between topics.
The course doesn’t test knowledge but focuses on developing skills. The topics you use are there to give opportunities to engage your students and get them involved in activities which build their ability to analyse, evaluate, compare different perspectives and reflect — everything that is described by the Critical Path.
There is also no fixed number of topics to cover in the course. You can move between them as you develop different skills and help your students to practise deconstructing arguments, writing essays and creating presentations in a variety of contexts. Start with the list of topics in the specification as your broad headings to choose from. The texts in the examination will come from one of these and they are there because they are all suitable for the kinds of skills and approaches required for Cambridge Global Perspectives.
From there, focus on what is in the news, both in your own country and globally. This will ensure the specific issues you choose are current and relevant, as well as giving you sources you can use for analysis and research.
If these are from editorial pieces or other types of argument, rather than just reporting information, they are more likely to engage students in a debate and allow them to express opinions — something which they will find more interesting, as well as being relevant to the course.
To an extent, the length of the sessions you have will not be under your control as they will be constrained by the overall timetable of your school or college. If this is the case, you will need to adapt what you do to the session length you have.
Having said that, if you do have the opportunity to focus on one thing over a double lesson, have longer sessions or continue an activity over several lessons that can be helpful.
Different session lengths can also suit different parts of the course better. Towards the beginning, when you may be engaged in more directed instruction and practice to develop the skills of analysing and evaluating individual arguments and evidence, shorter sessions may be more effective. Later, when students are working individually or in groups to undertake research, longer sessions, or a focus on the same thing over a sequence of sessions, can work better.
There’s no specific rule against using graphics of any sort in an essay (images, diagrams or graphs). However, you should also reflect on what is being assessed in the essay — the ability to analyse and evaluate sources and perspectives and to build a reflective argument in writing.
Although some students may find visual materials useful in developing their thinking, these are not going to be directly relevant to those skills. On the other hand, in the team project presentation, using visual aids is something students need to do, and using visual information of all kinds in specific ways to support arguments is potentially very powerful.
There is no specific reference style students need to use, although citation and referencing is an important skill which students need to be demonstrating in their essays. When students are starting out at AS level and writing the essay, Harvard referencing might be the most straightforward style to teach, but others are also fine.
Once students embark on writing the Cambridge Research Report, it is valuable to introduce the idea that there is more than one possible referencing style, and different styles can be more appropriate depending on the subject area students have chosen for their report.
Developing and framing a research question is one of the most important skills students need to gain while doing Cambridge Global Perspectives. Before they frame a question they will need to have something to write about, so reading sources for stimulus and debating the issues in class is a good starting point. As part of this, you can frame very broad debate questions, and then work with students to clarify, narrow down and modify the terms within them.
By following this process, they will learn to produce better questions by managing and removing vagueness and ambiguity in what they are asking, as well as controlling the scope and manageability of their questions.
Evaluating the credibility of the author and the reliability of the publication can be a good starting point when encountering a source. At the very least, it enables students to make decisions about how strongly a source can be relied upon to represent a perspective and so whether it is worth using.
For students who are less confident about evaluation, considering the credibility of the author and the reliability of the publication will also allow them to demonstrate that they can evaluate and so be very useful. In order to move beyond this though, students should be encouraged to consider a range of things:
– the strengths of individual pieces of evidence
– if the reasons fully support the conclusions
– whether the underlying assumptions of the argument are acceptable
Students should of course consider how weak or strong sources are when they find them in their research. However, this decision making process should be for the purpose of deciding what to include in their essay or presentation, and what to exclude.
Highlighting the weaknesses of a source is not necessarily helpful in itself, as it begs the question of why it is being used to support any perspective. Even when students disagree with a perspective, they should still be finding the strongest possible sources to support it so that they can evaluate the shortcomings of even the best possible version of that perspective.
When you are introducing deconstruction skills with students, it is helpful and important to make precisely this distinction between arguments and evidence, as they need to be evaluated in different ways.
Essentially, when we evaluate an argument we are looking at the strengths and weaknesses of the structure of reasons and conclusions. Do the reasons support the conclusion? Are there gaps between the reasons and the conclusion and what assumptions are required to make sense of the argument’s structure?
When we evaluate evidence, we are categorising it as primary or secondary, quantitative or qualitative. We’re also assessing whether it was directly observed, if it can be corroborated by other pieces of evidence and so on.
I hope this has helped answer some of the questions you may have about Cambridge Global Perspectives and Research.
To hear more from David, watch our Cambridge Global Perspectives & Research webinar on YouTube or explore David’s newest collection of Cambridge International AS & A Level Global Perspectives & Research resources.
