Risking SOLO Stations

Taking risks and trying new teaching methods is an integral part of my teaching practice. It isn’t easy, it means that I read lots of books and blog posts and tweak and change what I do each time I teach a unit. It also means that I have to be prepared for things to go spectacularly wrong – and sometimes they do – but, when a risk pays off, there is no feeling like it.

OFSTED

Ofsted’s Michael Wilshaw said “For me a good lesson is about what works … OFSTED will judge the quality of teaching in relation to the quality of learning and whether children and young people across the age and ability range are making the progress they should be from the starting points” (from @oldandrewuk’s What OFSTED Say They Want) . Unfortunately, the impact of OFSTED on schools and teachers often has the opposite effect, the desire to play it safe, to stick to what we know, to hide behind tried and trusted lessons. As the pressure increases, so we become more risk adverse; but that is not what good teaching is about … to teach well we need to be brave, to take risks and to adapt to the many changes that face us each day. And, most importantly, we need to ask ourselves ‘will it help our students make progress?’, ‘will it allow all students to achieve their best?’.

SOLO

For me, the catalyst to experiment, recently at least, has been SOLO taxonomy. (For those of you who are new to SOLO, please see my previous posts on the topic. It is also worth exploring the blogs of the fantastic @learningspy, @dockers_hoops, @Totallywired77 and @lisajaneashes.). SOLO has encouraged me to be more reflective of my teaching and to consider different ways of explaining and developing tasks. In my experiments last year, students made good progress, understood complex concepts and did well in their final exams. Perhaps it is a flavour of the moment, perhaps it is hard to separate the effect of good teaching and good teachers from the specific effect of SOLO, but anything that makes it easier to engage in a learning conversation with a group of students is, surely, worth a try.

Where next?

So far this year, I have been trying to embed the use of SOLO taxonomy in my teaching. I have used hexagons and HOT maps, which I trialled last year,  to good effect. I have also started to tweak my learning objectives using the ‘learning continuum’ idea from @learningspy’s fantastic book ‘The Perfect OFSTED English Lesson’ (a must for all English teachers as it is bursting with good ideas) and @fullonlearning’s ‘So that…’ (blog). These tweaks have made my objective setting more focused. But I feel that the time has come for a bigger challenge.

SOLO Stations

During the course of my reading over the past year, I have investigated lots of aspects of SOLO taxonomy, and teaching in general. I feel that I now have a good understanding of the levels and the types of tasks that can be used to help students move between them. SOLO Stations have been mentioned several times in blog posts, but up to now, I haven’t felt confident enough to give it a go. However, I have an observation coming up for appraisal and I want to showcase what I can do – so (bolstered by @Learningspy‘s success) this seems the perfect opportunity to try it out.

Lesson Design and Structure

Using the SOLO assessment rubric I mentioned in my previous post, I asked the students to carry out a self evaluation of the skills they need to use in their controlled assessment. I then used the feedback from this to identify areas to cover – the three areas the group felt least confident in were PEE paragraphs, comparing poems and exploring language.

As most of the group felt they had reached, at least, the Multistructural level, I have decided to focus only on the top three levels for the lesson. At the start of the lesson I will ask the group to put a post-it onto the SOLO display at the level they feel they are and at the end of the lesson they will be given a second coloured post-it to show how far they feel they have progressed.

The students will be able to choose whether to start at Multistructural, Relational or Extended Abstract. For each level, I have created a variety of tasks which, I hope, will help the students consolidate their understanding and grasp of the skills they need to achieve a solid mark for their first controlled assessment. The tasks will be pinned to the display board, to avoid having to spend part of the lesson rearranging the tables, so students can pick a task and work at their own pace.

I’ll post how the lesson went at the weekend, along with the tasks that worked well (hopefully).