To SOLO or not to SOLO

So I am supposed to be on holiday now, but I have an inability to unwind which I put down to one and a half decades of teaching. Instead, I have been browsing Twitter and the like, catching up on some professional reading. It has been a very busy term and this blog, which I set up with noble intentions for reflective practice, has been at the bottom of my to-do pile.

However, I have been a member of a workplace PLC looking into SOLO. We have been doing some reading, research, and a few classroom trials. We also had a session with Pam Hook to get us off on the right track.

The group's thinking at the moment is that we can see potential in SOLO; it helps us to clarify the learning intentions and aims of our units and is getting us thinking about how we really break things down for our students. One thing we don't like about SOLO is the language: uni-structural, multi-structural, and so on. Perhaps if you are a science teacher it might appeal, but as an English teacher it does not dance trippingly off the tongue. We feel that students are bombarded with enough teacher-speak as it is and we are thinking about ways to link SOLO to our national assessment system terminology. It shouldn't be too difficult as they are structurally very similar. Luckily I work in a school that recognises the need for adequate time when it comes to professional learning and thinking, so we have at least this year to experiment.