At a previous school we decided to launch the SOLO taxonomy to give the students a better idea about the level of their thinking. After half term i'm going to do this with two of my classes.
I currently teach some very hard working young people who, unfortunately for a good number of them, like to be spoon fed. I'm sure that if you teach them a formula and give them a sheet of 50 questions they would lap it up. Then change the question and they would be stuck. Why? Mainly because they do not want to think. Maybe this is because we don't challenge them to think enough. The tasks I have previously spoken about should hopefully allow the students to broaden their thinking.
So how best to launch SOLO then? Well at that previous school we launched it to one year group at a time in assemblies. The way we did it was to find a current(ish) topic (read fad) and see how the students would react to me singing a line from a song. We used High School Musical (which at the time was THE thing to do) and I sang one of Zac Efrons lines. The students were asked to do what came naturally and they sang the next line back to me. This allowed me to talk about SOLO by asking them some more questions about why they know that song, what else they know about HSM, what might happen in HSM 2......you get the idea. We wanted to show them how this linked to the diagram in the picture above. Those that had no idea what I was talking about would be Prestructural. Those that maybe knew the next line as they had heard the song but not seen the movie would be Unistructural as they knew one piece of information. If they knew who the characters were, what the movie was about and other bits of info then they were Multistructural. If they could link all they knew to the storyline and explain why things happened in the film then there were Relational. If they could take the movie and link it to, say, Romeo and Juliet or discuss whether or not Zac and Vanessa were still dating in real life then they were demonstrating Abstract thinking as they had gone from the topic and generalised it or related it to something else. This gave the students the idea of exactly what SOLO was and in the space of 10 minutes got them thinking about the way they think. We then took this further in lessons to show depth of answers in essays, how best to explain things in maths and stats, how they can research a topic in the humanities etc etc.
The question now is what to use to launch with my current Year 8 and 9. This is not a whole school thing, it is a me thing. It is me wanting them to finish this year off by stretching their own thinking skills and more to point recognising that they are doing this. I have a fairly good idea what I will use and it certainly wont be HSM and won't involve me singing. It will, however, involve them dancing. Maybe.
So how best to launch SOLO then? Well at that previous school we launched it to one year group at a time in assemblies. The way we did it was to find a current(ish) topic (read fad) and see how the students would react to me singing a line from a song. We used High School Musical (which at the time was THE thing to do) and I sang one of Zac Efrons lines. The students were asked to do what came naturally and they sang the next line back to me. This allowed me to talk about SOLO by asking them some more questions about why they know that song, what else they know about HSM, what might happen in HSM 2......you get the idea. We wanted to show them how this linked to the diagram in the picture above. Those that had no idea what I was talking about would be Prestructural. Those that maybe knew the next line as they had heard the song but not seen the movie would be Unistructural as they knew one piece of information. If they knew who the characters were, what the movie was about and other bits of info then they were Multistructural. If they could link all they knew to the storyline and explain why things happened in the film then there were Relational. If they could take the movie and link it to, say, Romeo and Juliet or discuss whether or not Zac and Vanessa were still dating in real life then they were demonstrating Abstract thinking as they had gone from the topic and generalised it or related it to something else. This gave the students the idea of exactly what SOLO was and in the space of 10 minutes got them thinking about the way they think. We then took this further in lessons to show depth of answers in essays, how best to explain things in maths and stats, how they can research a topic in the humanities etc etc.
The question now is what to use to launch with my current Year 8 and 9. This is not a whole school thing, it is a me thing. It is me wanting them to finish this year off by stretching their own thinking skills and more to point recognising that they are doing this. I have a fairly good idea what I will use and it certainly wont be HSM and won't involve me singing. It will, however, involve them dancing. Maybe.
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