SOLO Learning model and my first inset delivery!

Well there are two "firsts" going on here at the moment - my first blog post and my first inset to staff on SOLO taxonomy. (So be gentle with me if I am doing anything wrong but this is a great learning journey for me also).

I became interested in Solo through twitter and reading posts by some great teachers or should I say tweachers! My inspiration and motivation came from reading blogs by David Fawcett, Stephen Tierney, Darren Mead, Daniel Edwards and few others as well as the main lady herself Pam Hook. So thank you to all of you.  Reading these posts made me really think about my lessons and what was missing or how I could improve the learning in my classroom,  also reinvigorating me into thinking about how we could improve teaching and learning.

So here goes my first Inset to staff on the first day of term in September, with help, support, motivation and pressure :) from Stephen Hammond, the head teacher of our school. I must say at this point I did use snippets from nearly everyone else's presentations that I had looked at to produce one for myself to use.

On the day we were running a series of small workshops which meant there was only about 12 staff in each.  I had placed on the tables an A3 sheet with the solo levels and asked staff to complete these at the beginning of the session to see what they understood about SOLO, this is shown below.

Most staff were all prestructural or unistructural (which was great for me in case I said something wrong!).

St. Aidan's Solo Taxonomy   - view on slideshare

I then went on to discuss the presentation with staff and tried to explain SOLO in the most easiest form.  To involve the audience I used David Didau's idea from the Clevedon Teachmeet where I had the audience standing up with the various posters representing the graphical images used in Solo and then went on to explain what each level represented using volcanos.

Prestructural – not sure, it’s where we start off (e.g. what is a volcano?)

Unistructural – it’s where we have one idea about something (e.g. lava comes out of volcanos,It’s a bit like a mountain, the lava that comes out is molten rock)

Their knowledge (the three things or more) becomes multi structural.

Multi structural – there are several strands of things that they know. We now know that lava comes out of volcanos, it’s a bit like a mountain, the lava that comes out is molten rock. Building up that multi structural base is vital, you can’t go much further without it. A lot of what we do in the classroom is about extending that multi structural knowledge. But it only stays on the surface unless we try and link those ideas together.

Relational We then move on to the relational stage where we begin to relate these ideas together. The volcano is a bit like a mountain because the lava comes out of it and because it’s molten rock it cools and forms that mountain shape. He can usefully link those ideas together. It’s much more likely that that knowledge will stick because he understands the relationship between them.

Extended abstract – we can hypothesize, we can start to think about ‘what would happen if there was water inside instead of lava? We know it wouldn’t make a mountain shape – what would happen?

 

The key words used for each stage in SOLO are shown below and although these are not the only words that can be used, they do allow teachers and students to categorise learning outcomes easily.

With SOLO a learning task can sit at one level of complexity while the learning outcomes can be assessed across five different levels of complexity.

When I finished I was really surprised and pleased that everyone seemed enthusiastic to try using SOLO in their lessons. I asked the staff to fill in the A3 sheets what SOLO stage they were on at the end of the session and everyone said they were either Multistructural or Relational and ready to try it in their own lessons. RESULT!

I offered staff a list of blogs and websites they could follow for background reading and some staff have already made the plunge and started to use SOLO in their lessons.

The head Stephen Hammond would like SOLO to go whole school so I now have to present two more staff INSET's to the rest of the staff - wish me good luck.  As I said earlier this is a learning journey for me and I would appreciate any comments or advice if I am doing something wrong or could improve in any way.

Well that is my first post complete but more will follow to update on the future staff Inset and I will post about how I use SOLO in ICT lessons.