What an awesome title for a conference! A conference on thinking. But we think all of the time so why do we need to confer on it? Because we can think better and we can help our kids to think better. As the legendary (but sans hats) Edward de Bono said at the conference - things can be ebne (excellent, but not enough). What a neologism to live by, things are excellent, but not enough.
Anyway, enough rambling... I was lucky enough to attend this conference with two amazing colleagues from John Monash Science School, who are pushing the boundaries of mathematics education, Diane Farrell (@fardef) and Kim McGillivray (@kimberlyannmac) (follow them on twitter, I don't care if it is Friday or any other day of the week - ones to watch I telll you...)
From the masterclass with the legend of SOLO taxonomy, Pam Hook throught the inspiring keynotes, in particular from Ewan McINtosh, I was forced to think, evaluate, analyse, unpick, deliberate, rebuild and, in the words of Alvin Toffler (paraphrased) "learn, unlearn and relearn". I have no intention to describe in detail the workshops and conferences as I have recorded them in a public evernote notebook here.
Needless to say that I learned a ton, unlearned a great deal and relearned one thing - learning is not done by the teacher, but by the thinkng, reflective learner.
I also had a a massive fanboy moment with one of my edu heroines, Pam Hook...
Tait Coles and I were conversing about the SOLO taxonomy on twitter when I sent him an article by David Leat and Adam Nichols on the use of mysteries to concretely demonstrate learner understanding. Now Tait and I both have a passion for student learning and an equal passion for our own learning so the possibility of collaborating on a blog post was too great to miss out. Small problem; I live in Melbourne, Australia and Tait lives in Bradford, England. 10,000 miles apart, a 10 hour time difference, what a pickle. Luckily, being resilient and resourceful learners, we put a collaborative Google Drive folder together and started writing together. So welcome to the fruits of our labour, well at least the first part... In true collaborative style, the first part of this post can be found here and the second, well you’ll have to read the rest of this post to find the link to part two! (Or you could just scroll down, but what would be the fun in that?)
SOLO Mysteries
There is a powerful renaissance in the use of the SOLO Taxonomy, at least amongst those teachers who publicly discuss their work through blogs and social media, but SOLO is nothing new. First postulated in 1982 (BIGGS J and COLLIS K (1982) Evaluating the Quality of Learning: the SOLO taxonomy New York: Academic Press), SOLO, in its initial iteration, was intended to be used as an assessment tool to look at the complexity of an answer measured against prestructural, unistructural, multistructural and extended abstract criteria.
In the current work of Pam Hook, Darren Mead et al, the focus is moving beyond SOLO as a teacher assessment tool and a move to develop its use as learner tool; a roadmap of learning for learners to support their progression in depth of understanding. To this end, practitioners are sharing the language of SOLO with learners and working with verbs and question stems which both describe the SOLO stages but also empower learners to move from one stage to the next.
In this post, we would like to share an activity that was made popular in early 2000s through the KS3 New Curriculum and the focus on developing “thinking skills” (with many examples being published in the Chris Kington Series of “Thinking Through...” books) ; the “mystery”. In particular, we wish to further explore the use of SOLO as a tool with which we can look at the depth of understanding students demonstrate in this activity and strategies for moving them on.
The “Mystery” is, on the surface, a simple activity where students in groups or teams of 3-4 are given a number of cards with information on them and a question to answer. Some of the information is crucial and highly relevant to the question whereas some of the information may have a less obvious connection to the question and indeed there may be some red herrings.
Students then work in groups with the cards going through stages identified by Leat and Nichols (David Leat & Adam Nichols (2000): Brains on the Table: Diagnostic and formative assessment through observation, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 7:1, 103-121). This work, aptly called “brains on the table” allows teachers and learners to see a physical representation of their thinking. At this point, it is very easy to use the SOLO taxonomy to make qualitative judgements on the thinking of the students. Leat and Nichols explain how, in their observations of students working on a mystery, they were able to clearly see different stages in the process of interacting with the cards which it is possible to relate to the stages of the SOLO taxonomy. ”As we watched pupils sorting data physically on table tops it began to dawn on us that the manipulation process was a window on cognitive process and as such a potentially powerful diagnostic tool” (Leat & Nichols, Scaffolding Children’s Thinking - doing Vygotsky in the classroom with National Curriculum assessment)
This video shows a group of Y11 Australian (i.e. Y12 UK) mathematicians tackling a mystery where they were given information about ccordinates, derivatives at x values, descriptions of the graph and descriptions of the derivative and second derivative on pieces of card and asked to draw the graph. This activity was put together by my awesome colleague Kimberly McGillivray (@kimberlyannmac). You can download the activity here-
Download Mysteries - Graphing V2.
So how do the different stages observed by Leat and Nichols map to the SOLO Taxonomy, bearing in mind that the first three stages in SOLO relate to the quantity (or lack of) understanding and the latter two relate to the quality of understanding?
Prestructural and the Mystery “What the hell do you want us to do?” stage
When first confronted with an activity of this type, students may well find it difficult to engage with the cards, in fact they can’t see the wood for the trees and, as Leat and Nichols point out; “Those groups which, if left unaided, can make no sense of the mystery data in relation to the question could be considered to be showing a prestructural response.”
Unistructural and the Mystery “display” stage
When students understand that each card may or may not have information which is relevant to answering the question, they start to spread them out and display them, looking at each card as a unistructural piece of information. As Leat and Nichols say “Student responses use one piece of relevant data in a descriptive mode without a conclusion related to the data. The unistructural responses can be matched to the display stage, where data items, individually, are being tested for relevance.”
Multistructural and the Mystery “setting” stage
At the setting stage students are unaware of any relative significance or connection between any piece of information in relation to others. However, they are able to “set” or group the cards in an organised manner so that the data are in sets on the basis of what the students believe to be common characteristics or broad thematic themes. These sets could be grouped on the basis of ‘reasons for and against’, ‘useful and reject pile’ or grouped in overarching themes. Leat and Nichol describe this stage as where “On the tables, these sets are arranged as clusters, columns and blocks...The basic process being demonstrated is analysis, founded on the ability to classify.”
With the uni and multi structural levels of the SOLO taxonomy, the focus is specifically on the quantity of information learned as opposed to the quality of learning so, at this crucial point in the post, take a deep breath, grab another cuppa and click here to read SOLO Mysteries Part Deux -
Ok, having taken on board some critique, I have edited and, hopefully, improved my explanation of the SOLO taxonomy. There are three main changes...
1. I have started at the end by talking about the big picture of a concept we are trying to learn and then broken it down rather than building it up from nothing. In order to clarify this, I have added some of the letters from the word CONCEPT.
2. I have changed the circles which represent individual ideas to hexgaons. I have done this for two reasons; firstly there is an implication that having multiple sides means you are able to make multiple connections (now you mathematicians who are about to shout me down and tell me that a circle has an almost infinite number of sides, please take it from me it does not, it has only two sides. An inside and an outside ;)) The other reason I have switched to hexagons is that one of my favourite activities to help externalise SOLO stages in learners' thinking is by using cut up hexagons or Triptico's excellent think link tool.
3. I have added another stage post extended abstract. Now this is not strictly speaking a lens through which we look at the complexity of a learner's understanding, it is actually just the idea that when we really understand a concept and have explored the possibilities, that concept may well retract (is this the right word?) and become an uni structural element of an even bigger concept. (Thanks to Kim McGillivray from JMSS for challenging me on this).
As ever, this is a work in progress and, as Darth points out, one must prototype and take feedforward to get things right, so any comments are welcome (as long as they are knd,specific and helpful...).
Ok, lets practise what we preach. I am trying to create a very short, visual presentation of what the SOLO taxonomy means to me to use in the iBook I am developing around learning and personalisation at John Monash Science School.
It is very interesting to note that the original SOLO taxonomy was entirely focussed on outcomes (hence the name) but that the teachers (mainly from the twitterverse) that I have come across, use it much more as a tool for learners, as a roadmap of what learrning looks like in a particular domain or idea at each stage of the taxonomy. Now this video is far from perfect, but I like the graphics which I find help make sense of the leap from relational to extended abstract thinking. Please feel free to critique and leave comments which are, in the words of Ron Berger, kind, specific and helpful in improving this video.
The more I think about assessment, the more fascinating and intricate I find it. Superficially, it used to seem really straight forward; teacher tells you what to do and how to succeed, you do it and the teacher tells you how you have done. Simples. Or maybe it is having that just in time learning conversation which not only helps learners see where they are, but also where they can get to. The horizon is vast. Or maybe it is all of theses things?
I don't think a single blog post will suffice to make my thinking clear, even to myself, so in this post, I would like to focus on feedforward. Now you may think this is a piece of jargon with which we can play bullsh*t bingo, but I genunely believe it is a worthwhile clarification of what we truly mean by feedback, which Hattie's meta studies say has an effect size of 0.81.
I remember coining this term a couple of years ago (I am not claiming originality here by the way, simply that I had never heard the term - in fact a quick Google finds this from 2002) in an in house workshop on assessment with none other than my great friend Darren Mead. We were talking about the difference between formal AfL strategies (like setting objectives and succes criteria, reviewing learning of content, skills and attributes) and the kind of ongoing learning conversations that allow teachers and learners to have a more ongoing form of feedback (I discussed this similie here).
I felt it was really important to be explicit by what we meant by feedback as it has a myriad of forms and purposes, but more important was the need to differentiate between feedback which is someone or something (learning analytics) telling a person how they have been going in learning and where they are on their flight path towards a learning goal (this flight path for me is best understood for both teacher and learner through the SOLO taxonomy). Feedforward on the other hand is about supporting the learner with the next steps to achieve their learning goal. In short hand, one could use the acronym www/ebi - what went well (feedback) vs Even better if (feedforward). This approach is also exemplified in Ron Berger's mantra on critique which should be "kind,specific and helpful" implying some positive comments on the work so far, but as importantly specific and helpful ways to move forward. This video is a jaw dropping example of how effective that can be.
Now you may think that I am teaching granny to suck eggs and that all of this is implied in the term feedback, but two things convince me otherwise. Number one; observed peer, self and often teacher formative assessment comes under the umbrella of feedback because it is often about giving opinions and it is much easier to talk about what has been done well (and even easier to say what has been done badly) than it is to give feedforward which implies a reflection on the strategies, knowledge, skills and attributes which may help the learner move towards their desired learning goal or at least in the right general direction! Secondly, now that I am living in Australia it is amazing to see how diverse people's understanding of the language around assessment is; language is key and being as clear as possible can only be positive when aligning the scope of what is interoperable in terms of deliverables (see what I mean Tomo...) So I don't believe #feedforward is bullsh*t bingo fodder, but I do believe it deserves a hashtag and would like to hear your thoughts on it!
Here is a copy of the presentation I gave at Teachmeet Melbourne on this very topic on Saturday.
So, my new job is "Leading Teacher -Personalised Learning". So what on earth does that mean? Well, apart from developing an holistic strategy to assessment, data, learning portfolios and pedagogy in terms of personalising the learning and school experience (takes a breath) I am building upon the excellent work already happening in a subject called "Personal learning". Personal learning is a kind of learn to learn/PSHE mash up which has the intention of boosting students' learning power (if I can borrow Guy Claxton's phrase) in their first year at JMSS. The course is built around developing the skills, attributes and knowledge of succesful learners. The attributes we are working from come from UNESCO's four pillars of Education and are summarised here.
To give a brief taste of the year view, we will be moving from quite tightly planned learning experiences helping the students to reflect on themselves as learners, give them some learning tools such as graphic organisers, SOLO taxonomy, de Bono's Thinking Hats etc, up to their own design thinking challenge for the last term. ( I was inspired, as ever, by NoTosh to take part in a brilliant design thinking process in England in October- read about it here).
Throughout this, the aim is to use realsmart as a portfolio which gathers evidence of the process of learning as well as the outcomes and is owned by the learners (that is the trick; developing reflective learners who are motivated to reflect independently for a reason!) Below is the skeleton for the learning portfolio I am going to use although students can design their own.
So we are starting off by deciding, together, what skills, knowledge and attributes we wish to have developed after 3 years at JMSS and then we are going to decide how we go about it. There is a year overview, there are a few lesson plans and a structure but their are still huge gaps in "my" planning for personal learning this year and I hope it is from those gaps that the best learning will come!
What I love about the John Monash Science School mission is that it is not about preparing students for the future they will inherit, but it also recognises that we need to make our students confident and capable enough to create their own world and have a positive impact on those around them. I hope that personal learning can help them realise this.
"The Mission of John Monash Science School is to develop in all our students the skills, attributes, knowledge and balanced perspectives which will best enable them to make a positive difference to the world they will both inherit and co-create."
I am pretty sure that Jason Derulo was talking about the taxonomy when he said he was 'ridin solo' but I may be mistaken... Anyway after initial inspiration from Darren (@dkmead) Mead and contact with the wonderful Pam Hook and Julie Mills (www.hooked-on-thinking.com) I have been working on the SOLO taxonomy as a way to understand grammatical understanding in French. My experiments with y7 and concepts of gender have been quite successful (although I do need to review where to go next...) but I had a revelation last week when Damian Clark (@clarky099), Head of Humanities at Cramlington blogged about his use of hexagonal card sorts to promote higher levels of relational thinking. They have 6 sides you see, hexagons. 6 sides! 6 possible directions to connect! And what do you do if you have a pile of hexagons? You instinctively try to tesselate them - genius! Read his original post here.
So I took Damian's hexagonal cards and I filled them with parts of sentences in French which covered most of the "bits" of grammar from the As and A2 specification. I was confident that my Y13 class knew how and when to use the subjunctive and even agreement with preceding direct object pronouns but I was not sure if they were able to see the relationships between all of these bits of understanding (multistructural) and the grammar as a whole. So I gave them these cards cut up and let them go. At first they tended just to group things together (classic multistructural) but with some probing comments like "that's rubbish can't you do any better?" they started to see that they could make links and, most powerfully, explain the links very clearly. With a little more metacognitive probing, they were deciding which of the possible links were the strongest. The amount of feedback I got just by listening to their conversations was immense and my favourite moment was whne one lad said "but you could link the preceding direct object agreement with the superlative triggering a subjenctive becasue they both have a feminine agreement" and his partner replied "but one is verbal agreement and the other is purely adjectival". My work here is done. - Here is an example of one groups work (spot the deliberate mistake...)
