Fifteen days later!

I did have grand designs for blogging weekly, possibly even twice weekly - but it turns out that things get prioritised, and this being an extra bonus activity for me personally (as opposed to something I have to check off for others) has taken a tumble to the bottom of the pile.

Source

It isn't quite so bad that I'm crying out for help -  but it has taken a good week of prioritising and self-managing to ensure that all the commitments I've made are honoured.  I started thinking about our students - they too have life commitments, family commitments, seniors often also have work commitments.  Into that mix we add deadlines, assessments schedules and generally scary concepts such as exams.

This week I am going to stop and get my students to do some self-reflection and some planning.   We aim to teach the competencies of self-management; but if as an adult it is easy to get snowed under how much more as a young teen.  We're going to add in a few more checkpoints for our work and just make sure that everyone who needs extra support is getting it.

Board Work

Often as teacher's we put up the Lesson Objective for the day.  These lesson objectives may come in the form of "Today I will be able to ..." or "Today we will learn about ... " or "I can ... "  I am going to try a different system after seeing a photo on Twitter.  We often put them up on the left or right hand side of the  board and get students to copy them into their notes or exercise books.  The goal of this is to make sure we and the students know what the purpose of the lesson is, the reason we are doing things and for them to have a reference point for achievement for that particular day or lesson.

One of my students painted the SOLO images (second image) during our Burger activity (first image) and they were too large for the burger.  Not wanting to waste them, I thought they would be the perfect fit for my board and my goal to change the way I use learning intentions.

Burger Activity - breaking down our knowledge of essays/language techniques/word classes and SOLO - love our school, we were nearly out of time, so I asked the next teacher if I could keep them as I had a non-contact ... no problems!!!

SOLO board - will aim to scaffold learning activities through this.  I will still have some more standard learning intentions that link specifically to curriculum context where applicable.

The SOLO learning intention board is a work in progress for me.  I will use it where I can, and hopefully students will find it clear to see what to aim for and for their own self-assessment of their learning.  Today it was as simple as the Extended Abstract image had "Apply and Understand Activities" beside it, so students could aim to get to those activities on their Google Doc, and if they could complete those (with showed understanding through individual conferences with me) then they knew they were at that level.  

It's all about learning - and I'm still excited I get to learn alongside my class!

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.