Despite being quiet in the Twittersphere in recent months, I have kept an eye on it and have noticed increasing references to the SOLO taxonomy. If you are new to this concept then you are in good company, as I am also a newbie but inspired by tweets and blog posts from Tait Coles @totallywired77, Darren Mead @DKMead and David Didau @learningspy I figured I'd have go.
I am currently teaching Blood Brothers to a Year 9 group. We have performed the book (with some fantastic vocal talents from the students and a little help from the cd!) and I am now considering how to prepare the students for an assessment. The assessment objectives are open and my main objectives are that the students engage as much with the process of learning as they do with the content of the play.
To introduce the language of the taxonomy I began with a character investigation: the pupils were given 60 seconds to brainstorm everything that they know about the narrator. I then asked them to organise themselves into groups based on solo taxonomy. We have not covered this character before, therefore three groups formed: prestructural, unistructural, and multistructural.
Next the students were asked to organise themselves into pairs or small groups so that the multistructural learner could convey their knowledge to the others. I'm aware that at the moment, this seems to be peer teaching under fancy names, but I loved that this allowed the students to organise themselves and made the purpose of the task extremely clear.
Once all pupils were on the same page, they then worked together to pose a list of questions. Initially, they turned their facts into questions. For example - "The narrator speaks negatively about Mrs Johnstone at the beginning of the play" became "Why does the narrator speak negatively about Mrs Johnstone at the beginning of the play?" The students then looked back to their initial facts to see if they already had the answers. If not, they asked to see the facts of another group or, finally, turned back to the play to skim for more evidence.
One of the hardest challenges that I face as an English teacher, is finding ways to support students in exploring the text independently - I constantly battle with ways to convey information without telling them my own interpretation. Today I watched as 30 students set up and conducted their own investigations - during today's lesson the SOLO framework helped me to set up a process that supported the students without influencing their opinions. For the first time, the students explained to me that the narrator must engage with a middle class audience in order to be of any influence - something that I have struggled to extract from Year 11s.
I think I will enjoy experimenting with this further...any recommendations or suggestions are welcome!
