My SOLO Journey -2 weeks in

This school year is now about 2 weeks old. I've seen my year 10 SOLO guinea pigs for about three lessons apiece now.

A quick recap: I decided to try SOLO with my year 10 classes for a few reasons;

1. The evidence suggests that SOLO can boost achievement and despite what the GOVErnment suggest it does take effort to pass them
2. I have four classes on the same syllabus. 2 HT and 2 FT

The course they're following is OCR Gateway. I am teaching them C1 -Carbon Chemistry.

We began learning about crude oil. I taught the two lessons on the topic and then brought in the SOLO using Tait Coles' (@totallywired77) lesson structure (I tested this on year 7 at the end of last year and it worked well).

When I used SOLO last year it was at the end of a topic and it was an easy framework for the kids to understand and apply to knowledge they already had. In order to set off with SOLO in mind I needed to use Constructive Alignment (CA).
    To be honest this took me a bit of thinking to get my simple brain around. After 7 years of Bloom's I now needed to rewire my thinking and change the progression of the objectives from what I had done to what was needed in SOLO.

An example of the SOLO-ised (SOLO-ified?) objectives is:

(Unistructural) State one use for crude oil
(Multistructural) Give a range of uses for crude oil
(Relational) Explain WHY crude oil can be separated using fractional distillation I needed to stress the explain WHY bit to the students to ensure I got more than a description of fractional distillation
(Extended Abstract) Describe the problems that would be caused by running out of crude oil I found thinking at this level for my objectives quite challenging! Having to go outside the box yet remain relevant.

I'd really appreciate feedback from SOLO practitioners regarding anything in this post but especially comments about the objectives.

Initially I didn't use the SOLO terminology too much, I showed the objectives on a progress arrow and explained that we all needed to be moving to the right (towards EA).

In the third lesson, where SOLO was properly introduced I moved through the stages of using, applying and creating with SOLO. We created a mark scheme to answer the question "How is crude oil made useful?"

We worked through what we'd expect at each level and then set about answering the question. At the moment I only have the results back from the  foundation tier classes. They managed (on the whole) to write a response which was bordering on relational. Generally in the form of a list of facts about uses of crude oil with perhaps one link of concepts (eg "Petrol contains lots of energy, that is why it makes a good fuel").

It has been interesting to see what the results were and it is helping to inform my teaching for the next sections. I really need to sharpen up my own practice in some areas to help the students sharpen up their own.
I need to make sure there is sufficient material/scope for them to make links in class.

The experiment continues.