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. 

Going SOLO from the start

Well, its a new term. Time for some new tricks.

At the end of last term I found out about SOLO and tried it out on an unsuspecting year 7 class. It seemed to go well. The AST who filmed it agreed that there was some good stuff in that lesson.

Everything I've read about this particular taxonomy suggests it is a good aid to improving learning. I have decided to try to embed it from the beginning.

But how does one go about reinventing ones own personal wheel?
I'm fortunate this year that I have four classes in year 10 all following the same syllabus. Two classes probably aiming for higher tier papers and the other two most likely foundation.
   This means I get to try something, tweak it and try it again. I'll try to record my observations and reflections here as I go along.

Starting out:

My year 10 classes will be starting with module C1 from OCR Gateway 2011 spec. C1 is the organic chemistry unit. The first sub-topic is products from oil.

Over the summer I bought SOLO taxonomy book 1 by Pam Hook and read it cover to cover. My start point is Constructive Alignment of the learning objectives. The learning objectives in the lessons have had their learning verbs matched against the SOLO levels in the book.
  SOLO will not be mentioned explicitly from the start, I think I'll bring it into lesson 3 so I can use it as AFL when we have some content covered. I'll probably use a similar structure to the lesson I tried last term (A heavily copied lesson structure from Tait Coles @Totallywired77).

I'll add details of the lesson I shall begin with after I've tried it out, then I can record how it went.

Raspberry pi -school project

I just ordered my RasPi yesterday. I am nerdishly excited about getting my hands on a fag packet-sized computer.

I have a few projects in mind for it; media server (though I don't actually need another one!), data logging is my other thought.

I'm looking into connecting it to a range of sensors; temperature, pH etc. I think it would be pretty cool to build up a data logging system that could be monitored remotely. -Just for nerds' sake.

I'll update this post with any findings I make.

If you read this and have anything to share, please do reply!