My Past Misconceptions Teaching With SOLO

How I Used To Teach With SOLO

Had a great discussion with Jane my colleague today about how, when I first started using SOLO it would be all about the maps. We (the children and myself as the scribe) would sit on the mat and try and pull ideas out of nowhere and construct these maps, and after a gruelling session the bell would go. Off the children would run, never looking at the maps again.......lesson done!

I remember thinking..... "What am I doing wrong?"

What has changed?

This is how it kind of goes now:

Share the rubric as the success criteria for the lesson.

Bring in ideas, facilitate amazing hands on experiences, let them explore, discover new things.

Use a map to organise those ideas, connect them and share them.

Then let them apply their new understandings. 

This may take more than one session but the maps are one part.
Students use the map then move on to apply their understandings.

Today I wanted the class to analyse basic visual language features of a poster. Earlier in the week two boys in my class decided they needed to make posters to advertise the web site they are creating. This is the point they had arrived at through the inquiry approach learning that has been taking place. It was instantly obvious that they had little idea about posters/fliers and the appropriate visual language features.

Sooooo.... I need to teach my class about the language features of a poster so they could be successful in there self motivated creations.
We were walking past the Senior office when I pointed out a fantastically simple poster on the door. We stopped looked at it, I grabbed it off the door and ran in to photocopy it. 

What other posters could we find?..... off with ipads around the school they went, discovering, taking pictures and talking about what we found.

Back at class I told the children we were going to analysis the cool poster from the office, break the parts up, think about 'What if they were missing?' and why each part is important. We did a group part whole map, with me as the scribe. I covered up the different parts one at a time to make it easier for them to see their importance and kept the activity short, fun and with lots of backwards and forwards discussions. I even got them to walk past the poster with the picture covered up and see if they noticed it.......man they giggled when pretending not to see the poster.

Then I set them off with a piece of paper to make their own posters to advertise our web site.
I completely left them to it.

They knew they could use what ever they needed, ipads, art materials etc.
My surprise at the end of the day when I took a look at the end result of them applying new knowledge blew me away. They went from children who didn't know what to do, to graphic designers in a session.

My realisation:

• The lesson was fun! We moved around, explored, talked, discovered new vocab (My ESOL students didn't now what a poster actually was, I only discovered this as they were on their poster hunts). Lots of comparing and contrasting of the different posters they found.

• What do you want the learning outcome to be? What ways can you introduce new ideas, keeping it fun and hands on? What map/ rubric best suits the learning outcome? How will they apply this new knowledge? What would happen if I let them decided on that one?

• If I had finished the session at the end of the part-whole map (which is something I would have used to have done) they wouldn't have had the opportunity to apply their learning...... and create these......

Making Our Own SOLO Taxonomy Rubrics

Today my class made their own SOLO rubrics. They had to think of something they were amazing at or something they knew a lot about. They had to write a rubric for it, saying what each level might look like. 

We discussed the difference between declarative and functional knowledge and I showed them what a generic functional knowledge and declarative knowledge rubric looked like, they had lots of discussions in their talking groups where they helped each other decide on the different levels of thinking. Then off they went to write their own. A few of the boys decided to use minecraft. One of the girls in my class had asked them what minecraft was and we had talked about her having Prestructural knowledge about minecraft and that I had Unistructural knowledge because I could place blocks on top of each other but that was all I knew because I couldn't even work out how to move.

Above is the rubric that Joel developed.

This was a great activity to help them to connect SOLO to a something personally meaningful. Some needed more scaffolding but it was great working through it with them and seeing the connections taking place. It also was great for their pride and being able to celebrate individual strengths.

Then....... when I checked twitter this afternoon (I am a new fan of twitter for professional purposes) this HookED: SOLO minecraft clip appeared...... How about that for timing. I can't wait to show my children tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XrxiHHHaQA&feature=youtu.be&noredirect=1

The other awesome thing that came out of this was that some children wanted to prove that they were at an Extended Abstract level for this. Jack who wrote a declarative rubric about insects went off to draw a plan for an insect egg hatching box and Taylor who also wrote a declarative rubric about Geronimo Stilton went off to write a new chapter after I asked her what she thought might happen next in the story she was reading. You can just imagine how motivated these children were to independently go off and do this. I sneakily threw in some success criteria (as you do) like using full stops and capital letters correctly and using labels on the plan. 

Great Day! Thanks Bridget Casse for giving me this idea.

Jack's Insect Egg Hatching House:

Year 2's Discovering What Happens To Light As It Passes Through A Prism Success through using SOLO to understand the Science concept of light energy. Before each session we looked at the rubric and talked about what we would need to do to 'move up the ladder'. We would talk about what we already understood about light. I would then pose a question e.g. "what might happen if I hold a prism in the light?" and they would move off to do the experiment. I would facilitate by asking them to describe what they see happening and prompt discussions by asking "why?" Information was fed in through reading science texts and watching youtube clips. The children were beginning to have a great understanding about the light refracting through the glass but I wanted them to connect this to other experiments we did about refraction of light through water.  I wrote key words from across the topic, on hexagons and arranged them on the mat. The children manipulated the hexagons. They joined hexagons together if they could make a connection. They would then explain why they had connected the hexagons. This activity gave them visual prompts to connect their ideas and extended their thinking to another context. The children used a cause and effect map to record their thinking and had a rubric as a visual aide during writing. Their map became their planning. Overall I feel that using the hexagons  really helped the children to connect their newly acquired knowledge (light bending through a glass prism and the colours separating) to the knowledge gained through prior experiments (light bending through water). It was as if you could see little light bulbs go on.