School Holiday Power Blogging - Post No. 3

Even though it was the last week of the school term I was very excited about our whole day school professional development meeting with Pam Hook and Julie Mills - our inspiring SOLO taxonomy gurus. Having been to several breakouts during Learning at Schools was looking forward to finding out some more information on this "Structured Overview of Learning Outcomes".

I had done a little dabbling in my class and pod, however, was not entirely sure we were on the right track. Pam gave us an overview of the SOLO concept which certainly challenged my thinking. In Pam's own words it's a "brutal" simplistic framework that allows students to easily identify at what stage of thinking they are at, students can easily recognise what steps they need to take to improve their achievement and also provides teachers with very clear guidelines of where to next in terms of teaching. Most importantly it highlighted the importance of never under-estimating our learners.

We investigated the need to develop a whole school curriculum concept map and this will be an area of focus for our staff this term. Having an opportunity to be involved in choosing macro concepts and micro concepts will provide a more structured way of ensuring we meet all the requirements of our curriculum.

We created some "What If ...." questions to support our Water Conservation inquiry for term 2. What if questions are aligned to an identified achievement objective and level from the NZC, they help students explore the concept, context and achievement objectives identified through other perspectives, differences, alternatives, controversies and disputes. These were some of the "What if ...." questions that 5 staff members came up with in 5 minutes.

Here is a video from demonstrating the use of signals by Our Lady Star of the Sea, a school that has had recent pd on SOLO. "Brutal and Simple".