I loved SOLO from the minute I got my head around it! Both as a teacher of Geography but also a school leader. I could see so much potential for its use.
I have used Blooms taxonomy for as many years as I can remember in my teaching to plan differentiated learning outcomes. I would use a bronze, silver, gold system in which the bronze outcome would come from Remembering/understanding levels of Blooms (new Anderson version), silver from Applying/Analysing and the gold from Evaluating/Creating. I've got to say that this didn't always feel comfortable as they didn't seem to flow at times and I wasn't confident that students would progress in that way. The other, very big problem I have with Blooms, (and I remember having this conversation with the consultant who was introducing the staff to it years ago) is that a geography student could probably get a grade C in the exam simply by being able to describe and explain, which of course are at the lower levels of Blooms! What also frustrated me about it was that an explanation, for example, no matter how detailed was at the same level, so that a student explaining how volcanoes are formed in one sentence would be judged to be working at the same level of Blooms as somebody who wrote a page of A4 explaining it in detail. One of the greatest things about SOLO for me is that the verb explain would sit at one level of SOLO (Relational) but students can either be Prestructural, Unistructural, Multistructural, Relational or Extended Abstract, depending on whether they give one reason, several reasons, linked the reasons together or made generalisations and put them into a different context!
I immediately started to incorporate SOLO in to my own lessons with students of all abilities, however, what I was really excited about was sharing this with staff. Every member of staff at our school is part of a learning team. In our current cycle these teams have been Thinking for Learning, Assessment for learning with a focus on Feedback and Differentiation. These teams were already in place before I knew about SOLO and two had been chosen as a response to our last Ofsted! However, SOLO fitted perfectly. The Thinking for Learning team are looking to create a 'toolbox' of thinking tools for pupils to use. We had been looking at Hyerle's Thinking Maps, but the HOT SOLO maps in my opinion are better. Why? Well for starters there are 3 more examples that are at a higher order: the Predict, Evaluate and Generalise maps. Also I believe they challenge pupils to think deeper about what they have actually put on the maps due to the because boxes. Pupils are required to explain what they have put on the maps. Finally, they have success criteria which accompanies them, so a student can complete a HOT SOLO map at each of the SOLO levels.
The Assessment for Learning team were looking at how we can make our feedback more effective. Again another strength of SOLO is the ability to give feed forward information to students. To link with the work of this team I introduced SOLO to the subject leaders and explained why I believed it could have a massive impact on what we are trying to do. I asked them all to bring along a student exercise book. I then got them to pass it to the person on the right and then look through the books to see if it was clear the progress that was being made. This was difficult to see and came as a bit of a surprise to them! I then asked them to come up with 4 or 5 key skills they wanted students to develop in their subject areas. We then looked at how that skill would look at each level of the SOLO taxonomy. These have been made in to feedback stickers.
Finally, the Differentiation team have been looking at different ways we can meet the needs of all learners. SOLO is an ideal way of achieving this both as a tool for differentiation by outcome using the success criteria or as Tait's blog describes the use of SOLO stations, which is differentiation by task and pupil choice. I'm currently in the middle of reading 'The hidden lives of learners' by Graham Nuthall and in it one of the points he makes is that students generally know on average 50% of what a teacher intends the students to learn through a curriculum or unit. But that 50% is not evenly distributed. Different students know different things, and all of them will know only about 15% of what the teacher wants them to know. So at any one time, a teacher will probably face a class in which about 20% of the students already know what the teacher is trying to teach them, 50% know something about what the teacher is trying to teach them, and about 20% have little or no idea about the topic. What better way to deal with this situation than SOLO stations? Where students choose their own starting point based on what they already know and make progress towards extended abstract. If you do know of any better ways then please let me know!
So where are we up to as a school?
Each team has been introduced to SOLO and are trialling various things. The Thinking for Learning team are trialling HOT SOLO maps, the Assessment for Learning team are trialling the SOLO feedback stickers and some of the differentiation team are trialling SOLO stations.
In every classroom we have HOT SOLO maps on the walls. We have also got some very keen subject leaders who are doing some great things with SOLO. In my 10 years of leading learning teams both in my previous school and this I haven't introduced anything that has got people quite as excited as SOLO. If you need some proof follow @EV_Sport and @EV_Art and look at the fantastic work they are doing. They are also blogging about SOLO too!
