Kate Le Fever describes how SOLO is a process for enabling students to gauge where they are at with their learning and plan next steps. At Kate's secondary school they have rolled SOLO across year 9 to 11 in a number of different subjects. This enabled the teachers to have a shared language of learning and made a connection across the different subject areas.
I'm Kate Le Fever from St Andrews College in Christchurch and I'm head of biology and SOLO coordinator at the school. SOLO taxonomy stands for structured overview of learning outcomes and it's a way of giving students an understanding of the learning process to ensure they are able to gauge where they're at with their learning and what their next steps will be.
It's got five different levels of understanding where a student can be at prestructural where they know nothing, moving through to unistructural and multistructural and then finally relational and extended abstract which means they can take their knowledge and apply it to a new situation.
As SOLO coordinator I have been overseeing the roll out of SOLO at school. We started two years ago where all year nines in core science, social studies, English, and maths were exposed to SOLO using the hotmaps and self assessment rubrics. And then last year it rolled into year ten where we also introduced PE and maths. And then this year we are rolling it out so that we will have all year nines, all year tens and all year elevens using it in their classrooms.
We were lucky we had been involved in Assessment to Learn or the ATOL programme up until that point, so most of our unit plans had in fact been aligned with really good strong learning outcomes. So it was just a matter of aligning it to the SOLO taxonomy. It has been a little bit of extra work for teachers, but the hotmaps, which were developed by the Hooked on Thinking team, are relatively straight forward to use in lessons, and once the students know how to use them they actually can mean less work for the teachers in the long run.
It's definitely increased collaboration because teachers that teach core classes and have a core class in common will let each other know which maps they've used, which assessment rubrics they've taught the students how to use. And it's meant the students can then take that one skillset across all the levels of the curriculum. And it has definitely increased the kind of talking within teachers of different departments and given everyone a better appreciation of what each other teach in their classes. And it has also given us a really good tie in from years 7, 8, 9 and 10 with our middle school project because we have picked SOLO taxonomy as something that should be a common tool across those four years as well.
We've definitely seen a huge increase in the ability of what our students are producing. Once we've rewritten our assessments or our individual tasks within a lesson, the student work has increased tenfold in terms of the overall quality of it. And we are finding that we can give even our most limited students a most challenging question and because they know about the hotmaps they can at least approach the question, where you will have lower ability filling out the map and you will have higher ability students able to go away and write a paragraph or an extended answer at the end of it. So in that way it has been really good for our year 9 and 10, and then our NCEA results have started to show real improvement in our merits and excellences as well.
We have found SOLO taxonomy really good for actually unpacking the alignment of the standards and also unpacking the curriculum which now gives very little detail about what should be taught at each level. But SOLO taxonomy can be used to fully unpack an achievement standard. And then from unpacking that standard you can create a series of really fun and interesting lessons for the students rather than just typical chalk and talk.
My challenge is that as you unpack the standards for NCEA, that you go and have a look at SOLO and try and use a taxonomy in your learning outcomes that you will use to teach those particular achievement standards.
Kate Le Fever describes how SOLO is a process for enabling students to gauge where they are at with their learning and plan next steps. At Kate's secondary school they have rolled SOLO across year 9 to 11 in a number of different subjects. This enabled the teachers to have a shared language of learning and made a connection across the different subject areas.
I'm Kate Le Fever from St Andrews College in Christchurch and I'm head of biology and SOLO coordinator at the school. SOLO taxonomy stands for structured overview of learning outcomes and it's a way of giving students an understanding of the learning process to ensure they are able to gauge where they're at with their learning and what their next steps will be.
It's got five different levels of understanding where a student can be at prestructural where they know nothing, moving through to unistructural and multistructural and then finally relational and extended abstract which means they can take their knowledge and apply it to a new situation.
As SOLO coordinator I have been overseeing the roll out of SOLO at school. We started two years ago where all year nines in core science, social studies, English, and maths were exposed to SOLO using the hotmaps and self assessment rubrics. And then last year it rolled into year ten where we also introduced PE and maths. And then this year we are rolling it out so that we will have all year nines, all year tens and all year elevens using it in their classrooms.
We were lucky we had been involved in Assessment to Learn or the ATOL programme up until that point, so most of our unit plans had in fact been aligned with really good strong learning outcomes. So it was just a matter of aligning it to the SOLO taxonomy. It has been a little bit of extra work for teachers, but the hotmaps, which were developed by the Hooked on Thinking team, are relatively straight forward to use in lessons, and once the students know how to use them they actually can mean less work for the teachers in the long run.
It's definitely increased collaboration because teachers that teach core classes and have a core class in common will let each other know which maps they've used, which assessment rubrics they've taught the students how to use. And it's meant the students can then take that one skillset across all the levels of the curriculum. And it has definitely increased the kind of talking within teachers of different departments and given everyone a better appreciation of what each other teach in their classes. And it has also given us a really good tie in from years 7, 8, 9 and 10 with our middle school project because we have picked SOLO taxonomy as something that should be a common tool across those four years as well.
We've definitely seen a huge increase in the ability of what our students are producing. Once we've rewritten our assessments or our individual tasks within a lesson, the student work has increased tenfold in terms of the overall quality of it. And we are finding that we can give even our most limited students a most challenging question and because they know about the hotmaps they can at least approach the question, where you will have lower ability filling out the map and you will have higher ability students able to go away and write a paragraph or an extended answer at the end of it. So in that way it has been really good for our year 9 and 10, and then our NCEA results have started to show real improvement in our merits and excellences as well.
We have found SOLO taxonomy really good for actually unpacking the alignment of the standards and also unpacking the curriculum which now gives very little detail about what should be taught at each level. But SOLO taxonomy can be used to fully unpack an achievement standard. And then from unpacking that standard you can create a series of really fun and interesting lessons for the students rather than just typical chalk and talk.
My challenge is that as you unpack the standards for NCEA, that you go and have a look at SOLO and try and use a taxonomy in your learning outcomes that you will use to teach those particular achievement standards.
Kate Le Fever describes how SOLO is a process for enabling students to gauge where they are at with their learning and plan next steps. At Kate's secondary school they have rolled SOLO across year 9 to 11 in a number of different subjects. This enabled the teachers to have a shared language of learning and made a connection across the different subject areas.
I'm Kate Le Fever from St Andrews College in Christchurch and I'm head of biology and SOLO coordinator at the school. SOLO taxonomy stands for structured overview of learning outcomes and it's a way of giving students an understanding of the learning process to ensure they are able to gauge where they're at with their learning and what their next steps will be.
It's got five different levels of understanding where a student can be at prestructural where they know nothing, moving through to unistructural and multistructural and then finally relational and extended abstract which means they can take their knowledge and apply it to a new situation.
As SOLO coordinator I have been overseeing the roll out of SOLO at school. We started two years ago where all year nines in core science, social studies, English, and maths were exposed to SOLO using the hotmaps and self assessment rubrics. And then last year it rolled into year ten where we also introduced PE and maths. And then this year we are rolling it out so that we will have all year nines, all year tens and all year elevens using it in their classrooms.
We were lucky we had been involved in Assessment to Learn or the ATOL programme up until that point, so most of our unit plans had in fact been aligned with really good strong learning outcomes. So it was just a matter of aligning it to the SOLO taxonomy. It has been a little bit of extra work for teachers, but the hotmaps, which were developed by the Hooked on Thinking team, are relatively straight forward to use in lessons, and once the students know how to use them they actually can mean less work for the teachers in the long run.
It's definitely increased collaboration because teachers that teach core classes and have a core class in common will let each other know which maps they've used, which assessment rubrics they've taught the students how to use. And it's meant the students can then take that one skillset across all the levels of the curriculum. And it has definitely increased the kind of talking within teachers of different departments and given everyone a better appreciation of what each other teach in their classes. And it has also given us a really good tie in from years 7, 8, 9 and 10 with our middle school project because we have picked SOLO taxonomy as something that should be a common tool across those four years as well.
We've definitely seen a huge increase in the ability of what our students are producing. Once we've rewritten our assessments or our individual tasks within a lesson, the student work has increased tenfold in terms of the overall quality of it. And we are finding that we can give even our most limited students a most challenging question and because they know about the hotmaps they can at least approach the question, where you will have lower ability filling out the map and you will have higher ability students able to go away and write a paragraph or an extended answer at the end of it. So in that way it has been really good for our year 9 and 10, and then our NCEA results have started to show real improvement in our merits and excellences as well.
We have found SOLO taxonomy really good for actually unpacking the alignment of the standards and also unpacking the curriculum which now gives very little detail about what should be taught at each level. But SOLO taxonomy can be used to fully unpack an achievement standard. And then from unpacking that standard you can create a series of really fun and interesting lessons for the students rather than just typical chalk and talk.
My challenge is that as you unpack the standards for NCEA, that you go and have a look at SOLO and try and use a taxonomy in your learning outcomes that you will use to teach those particular achievement standards.
Jo And Tara feel that the current NZC assessment system is eurocentric, classist, and out of date. In this talk they explain how they have come to this conclusion.
Helen Timperley, Professor of Education at The University of Auckland, talks about professional development that makes a difference to student learning. Helen talks about the importance of combining careful assessment and analysis with pedagogical content knowledge, and ways teachers can gain this knowledge through cycles of inquiry into their practice.
In order to grapple with what seems to be an over use of testing, we need to think of assessment as information. The more information we have about students, the clearer the picture we have about achievement or where gaps may occur, and the areas we may need to direct extra effort and guidance.
