Starting with SOLO

One of my inquiry goals this year is to investigate (and implement) ways to improve the literacy of my Junior classes.  The school I am at has had some PD prior to my arrival on SOLO taxonomy.  I started investigating this about 8 weeks ago, and quickly found a strong model of understanding that students could identify with and that I thought was going to be useful in my classroom.

This model for learning, named "SOLO Taxonomy (structure of observed learning outcomes) provides a simple, reliable and robust model for three levels of understanding – surface deep and conceptual (Biggs and Collis 1982)." Source

It has  been great to not only be able to use the Pam Hook website and books that our staffroom has, but also to engage with other English teachers around NZ who have had actual classroom experience with this through the Secondary English list.    A source that I would not have sought out first, but ended up being useful was Pinterest - just goes to show you, don't discount the odd places.

So, all excited and inspired, on the first day back in term I had a go with my Junior classes.  We had briefly touched on the concpts of SOLO at the end of last term - so we recapped the levels of thinking before starting on some activities.   Over the holidays they had been assigned a novel, so they took the main characters and events and then connected them to each other using the sides of the hexagons.  It was a great way for them to start to see how characters and events intertwined.  Later in the day I used the hexagons again to link ideas and concepts together from feature articles.

Breaking down the concepts - (love my whiteboard tables!)

Seeing what ideas link

Senior class using hexagons to get ideas from a feature article and linked the articles ideas with their own prior knowledge.  The group then shared their ideas and putting them together for a collaborative knowledge hexagon.