Adventures in SOLO...
Arguably, one of the most valuable skills that teachers and schools can develop is that of learning not to experiment with new ideas. This might sound unexciting, but as Dylan Wiliam persuasively suggests here, this
is not necessarily so.
To summarise, he argues that it's more beneficial to work on the areas where there's evidence it makes the most difference to learning (formative assessment essentially) than to flit about, picking up the latest fad, giving it a go and then moving on to something else a few months later. I love this. I'm not trying to suggest that I am against innovation, creativity or experimentation in the classroom, only that when I do experiment, it's likely to be with an aspect of teaching which makes a difference - feedback being one good example. This way of thinking has become somewhat ingrained in me, to the extent that, in order for me to assimilate a new approach to the point of actually using it with students, it has to have survived a taxonomy of responses along the lines of:
Stage 1 - utter scepticism
Stage 2 - sneering cynicism / disdain
Stage 3 – Sniffy aloofness
Stage 4 – an emerging, reluctant realisation that, actually, this one might be worth a closer look
Stage 5 – mild interest, even emerging (muted) enthusiasm
Stage 6 – semi-excitement
Stage 7 – fervoured, obsessive exploration
Stage 8 – passionate commitment and desire to talk to everyone I meet about it, to the marked irritation of, well, everyone I meet.
Once all these stages have been passed through, the idea might actually make it near to a lesson plan. Odd, I know, but it's a useful defensive filtering mechanism. I think it's developed as a response to the waves of top-down educational initiatives we've had to navigate over the last few years, most of which, I am pleased to say, didn't make it beyond stage 2. Which brings me to the current darling of the edu-net: SOLO Taxonomy. Now this has been an interesting one.
For one thing, it's the first time I've really appreciated the power of social media – twitter in particular – as a CPD tool to connect like-minded professionals. I've benefitted hugely from the blogs of many colleagues, and the articulate, positive, realistic reflections and advice I've found there helped me to move through Stages 1 – 4 in record time (admittedly, this means about six weeks). Thanks to all those who have contributed to this – you know who you are, and it's been a pleasure to learn from you.
I won't spend time here going over what the taxonomy actually is – there are plenty of places you can do that, and I would strongly recommend all or any of the following: @taitcoles, @jamestheo, @learningspy, @lisajaneashes, @syded06. From what I understood from reading blogs of educators like these, SOLO seemed to address a gap in my teaching. For a while, I'd been pretty comfortable with the ways I was delivering writing skills, feeling that I was using AFL to help students develop their sentence structures, use of language, paragraphing and structure etc with reasonable success. However, I was frequently frustrated by the absence of quality or depth in the ideas that students come up with in the first place; this is a problem, as it's not possible to produce writing that students can be proud of if the concepts and ideas are thin or one-dimensional. Of course I'd tried to address this – emphasis on planning, success criteria which flagged up 'sophistication, originality', models and all that (in fact, if you want to see me having a crack at explaining this, watch the GCSE prep video here (5.39 onwards) - please excuse hilarious editing fail early doors):
But SOLO seemed to offer something more, namely a language and a set of concepts to articulate what aspects of 'sophistication' actually meant and felt like. Whilst the language – all the 'uni-structural' stuff - is tricky at first, the concepts made sense, and seemed important. It also seemed to fit within the 'broad framework of action' described by Wiliam in the above speech - those areas of practice which make the most difference (SOLO being closely related to learning intentions, success criteria, feedback etc). So, this week, I've had a go at teaching two lessons using SOLO. In my first effort, my plan was to:
1) introduce the students to the concepts using a presentation and @taitcoles X-Factor card sort
2) take them through another model, using the focus question ' why is basketball a globally successful sport?'
3) Get them to apply their own knowledge from other subject areas, namely the sculpture of Henry Moore which (I thought) they'd been studying in Art, and the Olympics, which I knew they'd been looking at in Geography.
4) Students were to try to demonstrate their knowledge of these topics at the various stages of the taxonomy.
In honesty, this lesson was something of a fail. In some ways, as the students would have it, an epic fail. Some of the things that went wrong: I made the presentation at home, emailed it to self, worked on it in my office, ran off to do photocopying then to classroom, without saving the presentation, thereby wasting 30 mins intense planning. I would describe this as a schoolboy error, were it not for the fact that very few schoolboys (or girls) would be so stupid. As a result, I had to deliver the lesson from a half-finished powerpoint, and at a time where I really needed clarity, confusion reigned (maybe not 'reigned', but was certainly enjoying a position of considerable influence... like the mayor of London or a high-ranking civil servant). To compound this, they knew nothing – I mean NOTHING - about Sir Henry Moore (not their fault, they'd never studied him), so I had to dump that bit - apologies, Sir Henry - if there was a level before pre-structural, it would have been them. Us, in fact. I suppose we did get some value out of the lesson – it was interesting to see them try to apply their knowledge of the Olympics, and we had a cracking, longer-than-usual word game at the end, but given that I entered school that day burning with Stage 8 enthusiasm, I was disappointed overall.
Interesting to reflect on how that felt – I was quite down about it, and certainly toyed with the idea of never going near SOLO again. However, after a little self-indulgent moping on break duty, I had another look and re-planned for a different class on Wednesday.
This time, I wanted to use SOLO to teach planning skills – students were writing a variant of a film review. They'd planned through some ideas during a cover lesson, and it seemed to me that it was classic multi-structural understanding – they all knew a few things about their films, and had some ideas as to why they were 'worthy of an award', but on the whole the plans were pretty dull, with focus on 'the actors', 'the setting', 'the plot' etc. This time then, I planned with:
- quicker intro to SOLO, still using the X-Factor cards
- slicker model of the basketball idea
- showing some models of their work- where would they put it on the taxonomy?
- HEXAGONS! This was the breakthrough – students wrote an idea on each of the hexagons, then we joined them up and moved them through to the relational stage. A good example was a girl writing about 'The Woman in Black', who had setting, suspense and 'era' on her hexagons. Putting the first two together led to an enriched discussion of how that particular setting supported the creation of suspense – what particular parts of the setting were important? How did they function to heighted and sustain the suspense? This was interesting and refreshing enough, but then introducing the 'era' hexagon enriched the discussion still further, with consideration given to the different ways that modern audiences might respond to historical drama, in relation to suspense – is older drama scarier inherently? How does it compare to modern horror / suspense thrillers? Which films was it similar to... and how did the fact that it was a film rather than a novel or a stage play empower directors to appeal to modern audiences? Exciting stuff – and, if I'm understanding this correctly, elements of Extended Abstract peeking through? Here's the ppt:
Not everything went well of course - notably, and I'd appreciate it if you kept this yourself, in preparing this lesson our 'student hosts' (kids out of class for the day to do reception duty) helped me tremendously by cutting out about 250 shapes for use in the lesson, only for me to discover at lunchtime that I'd given them ... octagons. I blame google entirely for this, and I ended up getting the kids to cut out their own in the lesson with no obvious ill effects. I haven't mentioned it to the student hosts mind you. Overall though it was an enjoyable lesson - in fact, compared with lesson 1, a triumph! Kids enjoyed it and improved their ideas, and I left with that enjoyable buzz.
I've loved having a crack at SOLO this week, and am definitely keen for more. The first lesson was frustrating, but necessary, and I'm pleased that I was able to fail and come back for more. I'm also delighted at the help I've had from other professionals, virtually or otherwise, and look forward to working with the educators on http://englishsolo.wikispaces.com/ to keep exploring. I'm looking forward to having another go next week... and if anyone out there could use a bunch of octagons - let me know!
is not necessarily so.
To summarise, he argues that it's more beneficial to work on the areas where there's evidence it makes the most difference to learning (formative assessment essentially) than to flit about, picking up the latest fad, giving it a go and then moving on to something else a few months later. I love this. I'm not trying to suggest that I am against innovation, creativity or experimentation in the classroom, only that when I do experiment, it's likely to be with an aspect of teaching which makes a difference - feedback being one good example. This way of thinking has become somewhat ingrained in me, to the extent that, in order for me to assimilate a new approach to the point of actually using it with students, it has to have survived a taxonomy of responses along the lines of:
Stage 1 - utter scepticism
Stage 2 - sneering cynicism / disdain
Stage 3 – Sniffy aloofness
Stage 4 – an emerging, reluctant realisation that, actually, this one might be worth a closer look
Stage 5 – mild interest, even emerging (muted) enthusiasm
Stage 6 – semi-excitement
Stage 7 – fervoured, obsessive exploration
Stage 8 – passionate commitment and desire to talk to everyone I meet about it, to the marked irritation of, well, everyone I meet.
Once all these stages have been passed through, the idea might actually make it near to a lesson plan. Odd, I know, but it's a useful defensive filtering mechanism. I think it's developed as a response to the waves of top-down educational initiatives we've had to navigate over the last few years, most of which, I am pleased to say, didn't make it beyond stage 2. Which brings me to the current darling of the edu-net: SOLO Taxonomy. Now this has been an interesting one.
For one thing, it's the first time I've really appreciated the power of social media – twitter in particular – as a CPD tool to connect like-minded professionals. I've benefitted hugely from the blogs of many colleagues, and the articulate, positive, realistic reflections and advice I've found there helped me to move through Stages 1 – 4 in record time (admittedly, this means about six weeks). Thanks to all those who have contributed to this – you know who you are, and it's been a pleasure to learn from you.
I won't spend time here going over what the taxonomy actually is – there are plenty of places you can do that, and I would strongly recommend all or any of the following: @taitcoles, @jamestheo, @learningspy, @lisajaneashes, @syded06. From what I understood from reading blogs of educators like these, SOLO seemed to address a gap in my teaching. For a while, I'd been pretty comfortable with the ways I was delivering writing skills, feeling that I was using AFL to help students develop their sentence structures, use of language, paragraphing and structure etc with reasonable success. However, I was frequently frustrated by the absence of quality or depth in the ideas that students come up with in the first place; this is a problem, as it's not possible to produce writing that students can be proud of if the concepts and ideas are thin or one-dimensional. Of course I'd tried to address this – emphasis on planning, success criteria which flagged up 'sophistication, originality', models and all that (in fact, if you want to see me having a crack at explaining this, watch the GCSE prep video here (5.39 onwards) - please excuse hilarious editing fail early doors):
But SOLO seemed to offer something more, namely a language and a set of concepts to articulate what aspects of 'sophistication' actually meant and felt like. Whilst the language – all the 'uni-structural' stuff - is tricky at first, the concepts made sense, and seemed important. It also seemed to fit within the 'broad framework of action' described by Wiliam in the above speech - those areas of practice which make the most difference (SOLO being closely related to learning intentions, success criteria, feedback etc). So, this week, I've had a go at teaching two lessons using SOLO. In my first effort, my plan was to:
1) introduce the students to the concepts using a presentation and @taitcoles X-Factor card sort
2) take them through another model, using the focus question ' why is basketball a globally successful sport?'
3) Get them to apply their own knowledge from other subject areas, namely the sculpture of Henry Moore which (I thought) they'd been studying in Art, and the Olympics, which I knew they'd been looking at in Geography.
4) Students were to try to demonstrate their knowledge of these topics at the various stages of the taxonomy.
In honesty, this lesson was something of a fail. In some ways, as the students would have it, an epic fail. Some of the things that went wrong: I made the presentation at home, emailed it to self, worked on it in my office, ran off to do photocopying then to classroom, without saving the presentation, thereby wasting 30 mins intense planning. I would describe this as a schoolboy error, were it not for the fact that very few schoolboys (or girls) would be so stupid. As a result, I had to deliver the lesson from a half-finished powerpoint, and at a time where I really needed clarity, confusion reigned (maybe not 'reigned', but was certainly enjoying a position of considerable influence... like the mayor of London or a high-ranking civil servant). To compound this, they knew nothing – I mean NOTHING - about Sir Henry Moore (not their fault, they'd never studied him), so I had to dump that bit - apologies, Sir Henry - if there was a level before pre-structural, it would have been them. Us, in fact. I suppose we did get some value out of the lesson – it was interesting to see them try to apply their knowledge of the Olympics, and we had a cracking, longer-than-usual word game at the end, but given that I entered school that day burning with Stage 8 enthusiasm, I was disappointed overall.
Interesting to reflect on how that felt – I was quite down about it, and certainly toyed with the idea of never going near SOLO again. However, after a little self-indulgent moping on break duty, I had another look and re-planned for a different class on Wednesday.
This time, I wanted to use SOLO to teach planning skills – students were writing a variant of a film review. They'd planned through some ideas during a cover lesson, and it seemed to me that it was classic multi-structural understanding – they all knew a few things about their films, and had some ideas as to why they were 'worthy of an award', but on the whole the plans were pretty dull, with focus on 'the actors', 'the setting', 'the plot' etc. This time then, I planned with:
- quicker intro to SOLO, still using the X-Factor cards
- slicker model of the basketball idea
- showing some models of their work- where would they put it on the taxonomy?
- HEXAGONS! This was the breakthrough – students wrote an idea on each of the hexagons, then we joined them up and moved them through to the relational stage. A good example was a girl writing about 'The Woman in Black', who had setting, suspense and 'era' on her hexagons. Putting the first two together led to an enriched discussion of how that particular setting supported the creation of suspense – what particular parts of the setting were important? How did they function to heighted and sustain the suspense? This was interesting and refreshing enough, but then introducing the 'era' hexagon enriched the discussion still further, with consideration given to the different ways that modern audiences might respond to historical drama, in relation to suspense – is older drama scarier inherently? How does it compare to modern horror / suspense thrillers? Which films was it similar to... and how did the fact that it was a film rather than a novel or a stage play empower directors to appeal to modern audiences? Exciting stuff – and, if I'm understanding this correctly, elements of Extended Abstract peeking through? Here's the ppt:
Not everything went well of course - notably, and I'd appreciate it if you kept this yourself, in preparing this lesson our 'student hosts' (kids out of class for the day to do reception duty) helped me tremendously by cutting out about 250 shapes for use in the lesson, only for me to discover at lunchtime that I'd given them ... octagons. I blame google entirely for this, and I ended up getting the kids to cut out their own in the lesson with no obvious ill effects. I haven't mentioned it to the student hosts mind you. Overall though it was an enjoyable lesson - in fact, compared with lesson 1, a triumph! Kids enjoyed it and improved their ideas, and I left with that enjoyable buzz.
I've loved having a crack at SOLO this week, and am definitely keen for more. The first lesson was frustrating, but necessary, and I'm pleased that I was able to fail and come back for more. I'm also delighted at the help I've had from other professionals, virtually or otherwise, and look forward to working with the educators on http://englishsolo.wikispaces.com/ to keep exploring. I'm looking forward to having another go next week... and if anyone out there could use a bunch of octagons - let me know!
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