Dabbling with SOLO I admit to having been pretty harsh on oxbow lakes in the past… They’re unfortunately still on the GCSE syllabus so require something more than a “meh” response. I’ve just spent an hour planning a lesson in which I’ll introduce them to Year 7. The class has completed varied work on rivers and meanders; running around the playground, flume modelling and more traditional activities. First I need to explain the rather lumpy terminology to the students. I have a simple PowerPoint with which to entertain and inform… and a worksheet stimulus:Oxbow lakes The final resource comprises an interactive version of the keywords from the worksheet above. In the interests of full disclosure, I’d like to emphasize the complete lack of original thought in this post on my part. John Biggs: David Didau: James Atherton: My thanks to you all.
SOLO taxonomy A few weeks ago I rather rashly offered to present on SOLO taxonomy to the North Somerset Aspire network. As always with this sort of foolishness it’s made me consider my understanding of the subject in a lot more depth. Before the Summer I’d never even heard of it. But since then the whole world (or at least the very narrow teaching geek world I inhabit) has exploded with SOLO fever. Tait Coles and Darren Mead have done their best to help me understand some of the complexities but it’s taken Lisa Jane Ashes, another English teacher, to get me over the last few humps. So, after cannibalising Tait’s Prezi, I began putting together a presentation which said what I thought needed saying. And here are the bits and bobs to go with the presentation : 'Grown up' statements on AfL to classify And the SOLO levels sheet to help prompt the AfL card sort: And the 'meta' hexagons (which are really just hexagons about SOLO and probably a bit of a disappointment) Like this: Like Loading...
The Learning Spy - Reflections on my teaching & their learning SOLO taxonomy I am pleased to say that John Biggs himself has endorsed this representation of his ideas; "I've just found your website on SOLO et al. via google. I'm delighted! Your diagrams of prestructural-extended abstract are very elegant..." The SOLO taxonomy stands for: Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes It describes level of increasing complexity in a student's understanding of a subject, through five stages, and it is claimed to be applicable to any subject area. I confess to a slight distrust of this kind of "progressive" model, which aspires inexorably to a final state. However, the emerging field of work on Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge links in very effectively with the SOLO taxonomy and offers some points about how the above issues might be addressed. There is a small but enthusiastic group of teachers using the SOLO taxonomy to structure their teaching in schools, and blogging about it.