Research On The High School Geography Teaching Design Of A Big Unit From Perspective Of Big Ideas

Currently,the trend of theoretical research and practical reform in basic education in various countries around the world is mainly focused on cultivating students’ core literacy.However,traditional geography classroom teaching is limited to single,scattered class hours,which mainly focuses on knowledge exposition,making it difficult to cultivate students’ core literacy in the geography subject.The General High School Curriculum Plan(Revised in2020 based on the 2017 edition)issued by the Ministry of Education emphasizes the importance of focusing on the big ideas of the disciplinary subjects,optimizing the curriculum structure,and implementing the cultivation of core literacy in the subject.The purpose of a big unit teaching is to achieve an understanding of big ideas.Big ideas and a big unit teaching both point towards the cultivation of core literacy in disciplinary subjects.Teaching a geographic unit from big ideas perspective is beneficial for promoting the organization and systematization of students’ knowledge,helping to cultivate students’ ability to solve complex real-life problems,thus implementing the core literacy of geographic subjects.This article studies the design of a high school geographic unit from a big idea perspective,with its main content including the following aspects:Firstly,this research provides a brief overview of the research background,current status,research objectives,significance,research ideas and methods.It defines and analyzes the relationships between key concepts such as big ideas,teaching of a big unit,and design of teaching of a big unit.Through a review of domestic and foreign research literature,this study identifies the research question of the article.Secondly,this article explores the theoretical basis and feasibility of designing the teaching of big ideas and a big unit from a theoretical perspective.By combining relevant content from cognitive teaching theory,holistic teaching theory,and geography teaching theory,it is concluded that the teaching design of a geography big unit from a big idea perspective should follow a student-centered approach,and focus on holism and contextuality.Then it focuses on the practical conditions of the unit design for Earth’s Atmosphere from a practical perspective.Thirdly,a questionnaire survey was conducted to understand the current level of cognitive awareness and implementation status of a big unit teaching designs and relevant big ideas such as energy conversion among first-line high school geography teachers.The survey results showed that most teachers recognized the positive role of the teaching of a geography big unit.However,due to the lack of case studies for teaching a big unit in geography,some teachers were unable to participate in the practice of teaching a big unit.Next,Based on the existing research and by organizing the common teaching design ideas for general disciplines and geography,the teaching path of geography based on the big ideas perspective is summarized as follows:(1)determining the big idea and planning unit teaching elements;(2)expressing the big idea and clarifying unit teaching objectives;(3)evaluating the big idea and determining unit evaluation methods;(4)generating the big idea and designing the unit teaching process.Finally,it extracts relevant big ideas for the unit of Earth’s Atmosphere based on the theoretical and practical foundation,and constructs a case study of the design of teaching a geography big unit according to the path formulated earlier.The case consists of five lessons:Lesson 1,Is the atmosphere heated by the sun? Lesson 2,What is the Earth’s heat balance?Lesson 3,How to calculate the average temperature of the Earth? Lesson 4,Where does the heat from the ground go? Lesson 5,Is the Earth warming up?...