Students DO make progress with SOLO Taxonomy.

It is a fine feeling when your gut feeling has a concrete and real basis. This is a reflection of my first terms use of SOLO taxonomy.

The graph above shows a year 7 mixed ability Science class working over four SOLO and assessed tasks. It clearly demonstrates that my students are making progress up the SOLO Taxonomy scale in a measurable fashion. I think this graph also shows my progress in using SOLO in providing quality feedback. I am aiming to reflect on some of the processes and discussion that occurred in between these points. (I will dedicate the final paragraph to explaining how this data has been compiled.) Although, I must point out that the scores discussed here are solely for analysis and reflective purposes and the students have not and will not have it reduced down to a number. SOLO taxonomy provides a framework for discussion of work during lessons, for comment only feedback and for self assessment for the students.

Although the first two points clearly show progress form a score of around 0.5 to 1.0, I believe this is only establishing a useful baseline assessment of my students as they enter their new school. I think it also shows the lack of my skill in using this tool, as 0.5 indicates that half the class are operating on average at a prestructural level. and that the progress made suggests that on average everyone is working at the unistructural level. In reality two students had progressed to the Relational level while not one single student recorded a multistructural level score on the first task. So, I am not overwhelmed by its immediate impact, but it's certainly seemed to move the students in the right direction. I must also confess that my strategy to introduce a generic SOLO was very much by stealth. It was visible in the class ,but, only gradually dropped into the conversation when opportunity presented. The first two pieces of work were self assessed by the students using a content specific criteria using the SOLO structure. No attempt was made to introduce the language straight off. I don't know if this was the right thing to do, but, I felt that the students had a lot to cope with managing the transition to a new school.

The third activity here was a group presentation, so I feel that this has skewed the data a little, as some of the weaker kids scored their highest scores in this activity. This makes me want to underplay the progress here, as this suggests that on average the class is now at Multistructural and the raw data shows no one has remained prestructural, pleasing as this is it is not assessing individual performance.

However the value of this activity is significant, as it is this stage that I and my students began to fully come to terms with using it. The students made a presentation that required using several pieces of information/data to draw a conclusion. I listened to them and made notes and then together we used the evidence gathered to assign their group a level. This generated great dialogue which I believe has had a lasting impact. Some students were even saying things along the lines of " If we had of said this ......would we have get the next level".

Following this activity I made a presentation at the Teachmeet Northeast, about SOLO taxonomy where I came up with an analogy of its use. I decided to use it with my students and formally introduce SOLO taxonomy . It went down a storm with some students even recognising and identifying the levels before I had explained them, maybe stealth works as a teaching strategy. The students were also provided with a large copy of the taxonomy for their desks as they worked as a reference. The students went onto complete the fourth activity in this review. Half way through I took several statements from student work and asked them to assess where they thought it was, and how to improve it. I felt at the time this discuss was useful so I photographed the examples. Whilst marking the students scripts I was especially pleased by the amount of crossing out, arrows to add new details in and squashed sentences into gaps that really were not there. Pretty no, but indicative of reflection and demonstration of their understanding of not only the content of the lesson but of SOLO taxonomy too

So, overall this activity yielded a score of around 2.5 on this scale indicating that the majority of the students where working at the relational level albeit within small bits of content. This has been the thrust of my feedback about broadening out teheir knowledge base so that more and a wider range of connections could be made. All in all this set of data demonstrates the students making progress through the use and structure of the SOLO taxonomy, in a relatively small period of time.

How the data was produced.

Each SOLO level was assigned a score from 0- 6. (I have meddled with the structure slightly.)
The number of students at each level were tallied for each activity and multiplied by that score.

The score was then divided by the number of students in the class to give an average score per student.

The score has then been plotted against the order of these SOLO assessed tasks.

10 benefits for empowering your lessons with pedagogical purposes.

The term pedagogical purpose designates an learning activity an extra benefit rather than just delivering a bit of learned content. Meaning that by definition it is shared by the teacher with the learners. The idea came from PEEL in Australia. Check out its website ( www.peelweb.org) for excellent classroom based examples. So why include them in your lesson plan?

1. It encourages metacognition,and therefore will develop learner skills or build learning power as Guy Claxton would say. For example if a strategy is good for making comparisons such as venn diagrams, then by signaling this purpose the teacher creates awareness in their learners. This leads to the next benefit of...

2. Increased independence of students. Having a pedagogical purpose in every day lessons will assist students in enquiry based or problem based learning lessons. They will have a wider range of "tools" to get unstuck and learn by themselves.

3. On task behaviour and the quality of work improves as students take each task seriously, after all each task has a purpose.

4. Teachers plan better lessons as they stop planning "busy" task and start including focussed learning activities, which are easier and more productive in creating feedback loops to exploit.

5. It increases teacher reflection on their classroom. Asking why strategies work will lead to asking how can I adapt this strategy which will eventually lead to creating your own.

6. The next natural step in this process is Action research which is well documented as a very effective form of professional development. So rather than sharing anecdotes with your PLN, you can share and discuss objective data based analysis of the new things you are trying on your classroom.

7. Teachers will dismiss the notion of having a teachers toolkit that they can dip into. Pedagogical purposes are an engineering factory allowing teachers to become more autonomous.

8. It's flexible so can be used with pre and post diluvian strategies. Infact it may be more beneficial when using web 2.0 tools to prevent them becoming the new PowerPoint, I.e. The educational equivalent of colouring in.

9. Pedagogical purposes broaden the feedback a teacher can give. The research by Black and Williams indicates that good feedback should indicate where the students are, where they should be heading and how to get there. It is this final steps that pedagogical purposes fit best.

10. They help develop a teachers pedagogical content knowledge, so teachers can develop multiple strategies to teach the same topic, understand and identify the misconceptions students are likely to have. Ultimately teachers are better equipped to teach, unteach and reteach.

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Giving Feedback on the process of learning.

Once in a while it is so nice to talk with students about something other than what they could be examined on, even when what you talk about is actually more important than the exam. The learning process is one of those things. This technique is applicable across these skills, and can transform what your classroom environment is like.

The first step to having this conversation, was the designing of an activity that would bring the key issues to the surface. In this instance the focus was how students collaborate. A simple of trick of asking the whole class (25 students) to do a task that would be easily completed by a smaller group, say 5 students. The pressures of working in a large group are much more acute, it's almost like setting them to struggle ,as the pressure ( and previous experiences) will see them focus on the content rather than the process. The students in this lesson where asked to construct a food web out of 25 organisms.

The lesson began with the students and I compiling a list of what they think good learners do when they collaborate. This list is theirs and I always ask permission to provide feedback on it using a thumb up for agreement, a level thumb for something they can live with and a thumb down if they want to amend the list before I use it for feedback. The list has now turned itself into success criteria.

The students then "do" the activity, and I write down observations snippets of conversations, counts of number of points, the number of people who are talking at the same time etc. I use one Post it note per statement, and in this lesson I did it for 15 minutes. A tight time scale is another way inducing students to forget about the process and make the mistakes that may not always be an issue in smaller groups.

At the end of the challenge, I give feedback and ask questions about the content of the activity and gather the students around their previously agreed success criteria. At this point I ask for permission to add a "disappointments" column, adjacent their success criteria. I then read out my observations one by one stressing that I am not making any judgements, just giving them factual feedback. I ask them to direct me in placing each statement on either the success criteria it matches, (for example " Great idea Tom!" May be placed on we encourage each other) or in the disappointments column.

The students really pay attention to this, I think they feel a little empowered. They also feel a little chastised as they are a lot more critical of themselves than a teacher ever could be. This is why a safe and trusting classroom environment is needed. For example some quiet students will not force into this kind of activity preferring to keep silent. Some members of the class will feel it i their fault, but others will see the groups responsibility to invite everyone to participate. This is kind of dialogue that find this strategy engenders and that changes students view and participation in the activities.

It is not just collaboration that this works on you could have questioning, decision making, reasoning, risk taking, the list goes on, but the strategy works.

For a more detailed read about this technique in my classroom please search it out on http://www.peelweb.org/. typing in author search MEAD.

A Simple task with big Impact.

The activities I would like to highlight here all take place within the first 10 minutes of a lesson commencing. Two of them have long been hard wired into my practice and I some what take them for granted. So the one I want to highlight is something that I picked up in Geoff Pettys inspiring "Evidence based teaching." It's not something new, in fact it is standard practice on any TEEP course I run, but, it has not made it into my classroom on a regular basis until this year. The beauty of Geoff Pettys book is that it gives activities a pedagogical purpose and backs up if effectiveness with evidence from either Hattie or Marzano.





The strategy is very simple, the simplest of the three by some way. All that is required is a visual representation of the learning that is about to happen.My interpretation of this can be seen in the examples I have used in the last two days. Anecdotaly the impact of this is profound. during one course a teacher complained that (since she had been late and missed the overview of the day) she could not see the overview as it had been obscured by another display and that she felts disorientated, as she not know what was going on. I have noticed my students increasingly asking me "are we now onto X ?", and I regularly see their eyes glancing up and down it.I feel it is well used, no less by me who uses it to clarify lesson plans in the morning, so that I have a very clear purpose and direction to the task chosen and in planning for managing transitions during the lesson. The effect size of this strategy is 1.27 . Needless to say this is a positive result. If you need more information on effect sizes you need to buy either Geoff Pettys book or John Hatties "Visible learning". In fact I would say every teacher needs these inspiring books.



The other two strategies are on the surface just as simple but in reality some of the most difficult tasks a teacher must do. Firstly is setting goals, or learning intentions or learning objectives. This is so hard, research shows tht teachers tend to write these as tasks rather than what will be learned. The effect size for this is 0.51. Again a worthwhile pursuit at the beginning of a lesson.





Finally a task issued at the start at the beginning of recalls prior learning. Petty recommends using questions here but any cognitive task will help, for example rank in order the most important facts from last lesson, as opposed to a word search of keywords. It is the connection and the search for meaning that is important not the simple recall. The effect size for this is 0.91.



When I read Petty the word "Wow!" stumbled from list as he points out the doing all three has a total effect size of 2.66. All in the first five minutes! Since reading this at least 90% of my (non enquiry) lessons begin in this way.

I believe it is the combination of these help students throughout the lesson: Where have they been, where are they going to and how are they going to get there. It's the foundation of comment only marking on a whole class basis. If I now ask my students what are they learning about then most of them will look to the graphical representation of the lesson first and then look at the outcomes displayed. It's very presence is giving them a pedagogical (albeit content based) purpose to each activity. Again consider an anecdote, if you want the students to do a presentation or a test, they know from the beginning and it' not just sprang upon them, they know from the start and in the context of their learning. It's all there for them in Technicolor!

Finding Success in low achieving students . Challenging my own folk theories.

Probably inspired by reading Carl Bereiter, I have just spent several days pulling apart an apparent simple decision, asking myself why I would use a strategy with my students.The strategy in question is a tried and tested one, or so I thought. I used to do this and my recollections are all positive, and I believe it had an impact on not only student motivation but also their success.
All it involves is displaying the most successful students in the class after and test. Not, by their raw score but by how much they beat their targets by. Obviously a percentage target is useful. My expereinces of this with many classes, always in the first instance had one or two students meeting or exceeding their targets, with the number growing over subsequent tests and over the year ending up with one or two not on the list. I have always found that students are especially excited to find their results in this fashion and that students not minding this score displayed even if they missed their target. This was always done after a negotiation, and therefore I could rank the scores. I stopped using it when we ditched percentage targets in favour of a sub division of SAT levels.

So where does this dilema lie? It was a great strategy as my gut feeling tells me that it often found success for the weaker students in my class. I felt as though it leveled the playing field in terms of ability. It's more democratic right!? Everyone has a target based on the same data; CAT scores or KS2 aggregated scores in this case, it must be fair!? Therefore everyone can be succesful. But as I began to compile the class scores I began to notice (or at least imagined) a pattern. This may be a result of reading a lot by Carl Bereiter debunking the notions of Folk theories in education, that things work because they, on the surface can be made to appear that they work, but in reality they do not stand upto scrutiny. This has resulted in me questioning my pedagogical purpose of using this strategy.

The problem I have is two fold. Firstly, I am concerned that this strategy is more difficult for higher ability students to better their targets,as they have less room for manouvre, or so my folk theory tells me. I have reminded myself that this strategy is not primarily for them, and that they enjoy success in its purest form. The best marks and grades, as this graph of two of my classes bares out.More able students get better scores. Which prompts two thoughts why bother testing them if CAT scores are this reliable, and that the test I used is valid across the ability range.

The next thing I queried was why some well motivated students had not met or exceeded their targets. Part of our school review requires us to rate students responsibility for the learning; taking into account motivation, amount of on task behaviour and their ability to get unstuck. All learner qualities you may assume would impact on this kind of study. But not in my post-Bereiter world, the evidence suggest not with the two classes below showing a very slight regression in this respect.
So my less motivated and "lazier" students appear to be beating their targets more. Although it should be pointed out that their is a slight correlation between their responsibility for learning and overall success, but it's not as strong as I imagined. What on earth am I doing wrong with them? I'm not if I am not very good at teaching high ability, as my less motivated ones are progressing well? Do I need an alternative stategy to also motivate and challenge the more motivated? I am hoping that this strategy will motivate all.

Obviously this is what has stumped me. It may be that motivation has little impact on actual learning, it could be that these students are learning with what they are doing? It may be that the more able students are slightly penalised by this strategy? My gut folk theory is that it does. Indeed the next graph suggests an element of truth in these sentiments.

It could be something and nothing, after all it's not a strong correlation. But, what I have decided is that if this strategy works, I should see the recumbent motivated learner rise over the next few tests to create a positive correlation, and more importantly that I have more students celebrating as they have beaten their target. This situation pleases me now as I have a
testable hypothesis with an attached success criteria. I can begin to move away from my folk theory and find out something about how my students work.