The teacher who believes that he is reaching just about one town is the focused teacher; but in doing that teaching, he may be neglecting significant learning. The children need to understand the notion of there being different sorts of towns before they can confidently define their own. So divergence from the central focus –Swansea- is necessary. The specific learning needs a generalised context, or it may make no sense. Children have to learn both that we define towns in terms of types and how we do that. This lesson needs opening activities, based on comparisons, which will establish that context.
How do you manage divergence without losing focus? You need clear planning decisions about how the general relates to the specific, and you need instruments and lesson resources to do this. For example, how do we classify a town? We might look at its size, its location, the way it makes its money, what people living there spend their time doing. We are now building general checklist for town-type classification. This can be presented to children. In the left-hand column are these categories. The right-hand column is blank. In a sense, this looks like a list of questions, with blank space for answers, and we may be tempted, therefore, to believe that the right-hand column is where the learning is Swansea is a port; that’s what we’ve learned. It’s in the right-hand column. It’s a fact. But the left-hand column is vital to the learning, because that’s where we’re learning not about Swansea but about how we talk about towns-how geography works.