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......