A SOLO update

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Four weeks have passed since the start of the year so it’s a good time for me to reflect and evaluate my SOLO journey. This year my focus is on implementing SOLO (Structured Observed Learning Outcomes) in my science classes. The purpose of this journey is to explore how I can allow my students to become better self-regulated learners, to become better at assessing their own performance. Over the Christmas holidays, I used a book called Using SOLO as a Framework for Teaching to re-design the units of work in Term 1 so each unit is framed around learning intentions and success criteria for SOLO.

Here is an example.

I decide to use ‘levels’ rather than the proper terms for SOLO to make it more student-friendly.

Level 1 = unistructural and multistructural

Level 2 = relational

Level 3 = extended abstract

The poster below has been made for students to see in the classroom. The ‘levels’ were also explained to students at the start of the year and briefly in each lesson.

SOLO

All my lessons now start with an explanation of the learning intentions and success criteria. At the end of the lesson, each student looks back at their work and tick off which level they have achieved.

Through informal conversations with students, they say they like it as they know what they are expected to be able to do right from the start and they like ticking what they can do; it lets them explicitly see what they have learnt.

Over the next few months I’m going to embed the SOLO levels to self evaluation and peer evaluation tasks. Eg. Students marking their own and each other’s writing based on SOLO levels.

However, I need new ideas on how to better implement this. At the moment my students copy the learning intentions and success criteria in their books. One positive about this is that it acts as the settling down activity. It also makes the context of the activities they complete in their books clearer when they revise. Now they have a lesson title, learning intentions and success criteria right before the glued in worksheets, writing tasks, etc. What I don’t like about it is that copying learning intentions and success criteria is not a ‘minds on’ activity. I used to do quick quizzes, which are short questions that revise the previous lesson. While they are not the highest order questions, they do require students to use their brains more than copying text from the board.

So here’s my dilemma: Should I continue with my current routine of having students copy learning intentions and success criteria or replace this copying with quick quizzes and have the learning intentions and success criteria printed on slips of paper for students to glue into their books? Note that half of my classes require strict routines and do not cope well with changes. I’m concerned that it if I change things now, it might throw out the work I’ve done so far to get them into this routine.

What do you think I should do? How do you set up learning intentions and success criteria in your classroom?

Plague Inc – Learn while you infect the world

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It’s the summer holidays here in Australia. This means I get to play more games than usual. Rather than spending my evenings planning lessons, I get to sit on the couch with my tablet and play games while watching the Australian Open.

Last week I stumbled across a game called Plague Inc, available on iOS an Google Play. The goal of the game is to design a disease that will become an epidemic that wipes out humanity. You as the player chooses where you start the disease, the symptoms of the disease, how the disease will be transmitted and the defence mechanisms it will have such as drug resistance.

The game is an authentic simulation of epidemiology. While it is not 100% scientifically accurate, it is accurate enough to reflect the following epidemiological aspects:

  • The location of the origin of the disease affects where and how fast the disease is transmitted. For example, a disease originating in a third world country with limited health care resources will spread faster than the same disease originating from a first world country. The disease will also spread via transport routes.
  • To design a disease that will kill everyone on Earth, the player needs to balance the rate of transmission, the severity of the disease and how lethal the disease is. Making the disease too lethal early in the game will result in doctors noticing the disease and research on a cure will begin too soon.
  • Islands are harder to infect. In the game it is often difficult to spread the disease to Greenland and Madagascar.
  • The transmission of disease follows trade and travel routes.

Plague Inc has a lot of potential in games based learning. I am planning to use it as an introductory activity for students to think about how diseases are spread on a global scale and how scientists approach epidemics. The game can be used to discuss evolution of pathogens and vectors of diseases. The game can also be used for students to test out how wealth and regional location affect a country’s ability to respond to epidemics.

Plague Inc also throws in some ethical issues. In the later stages of the game, it shows how countries begin to respond to massive numbers of people dying. Some countries’ governments are overthrown, some countries fall into anarchy and some countries bomb areas with large numbers of infected people in order to control the spread of disease. This can be used as a stimulus for a whole variety of learning that spans across many subjects.

I am planning to use Plague Inc with my Year 9 class this year when we are learning about diseases. I am going to use the game in the beginning and have students come up with questions they would like to explore and mould that into a project based learning opportunity.

Plague Inc is a bit morbid and perhaps not entirely politically correct, so it is best to check with your principal if you are thinking about using Plague Inc in your classes as well.

Along came SOLO

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I had an epiphany in the Christmas holidays. All of sudden everything I have learnt about learning from university teacher education, academic readings, personal experiences as a student and my day-to-day experiences as a teacher gelled together into a completed puzzle.

I have always been a teacher who likes to try new things. That’s because I always want to improve my students’ learning and achievements. However everything I have done seems to be in pieces and it felt like I was moving from one fad to another. The list below briefly lists all the learning strategies I have implemented in my past 5 years of teaching:

  • Project based learning
  • Games based learning
  • Gamification
  • Social networking
  • Assessment for learning
  • Habits of mind
  • Goals, medals and missions model of feedback

This list doesn’t include all the whacky science experiments that attempt to increase student engagement and students’ understanding of abstract concepts. The list doesn’t include the large array of online tools I use with students. The list also doesn’t include the large number of classroom management strategies I have tried.

Not only did it feel like I was moving from one new fad to another, I have always questioned the effectiveness of these strategies. My students were engaged and achieving. I knew this from their work samples and survey responses. However, how do I know each and every one of my students were having their achievement and learning maximised by whichever strategy I was using. All of the strategies I used require intensive effort from the teacher. How did I know the pay-off was balanced by the effort put in?

And along came SOLO …

SOLO isn’t new to me. I have always had a good understanding of SOLO from working on ESSA and NAPSL. SOLO is a framework for classifying different levels of understanding. In some ways it is similar to Bloom’s taxonomy.

But before the Christmas holidays, SOLO was one of the things on the long list of strategies. However during the holidays, I read two books that finally pieced everything together – Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning and Using SOLO as a framework for Teaching.

The key messages I got from Hattie’s books are:

  1. Teachers are activators and evaluators of learning
  2. Goal setting, self monitoring, concentration and deliberate practice are among the most effective strategies

This really spoke to me because it felt like someone finally have said to me I was on the right track for having my students complete all those surveys, exit passes, regular quizzes, etc so that I knew how they were going and change my teaching accordingly. Also it was always my gut feeling from my first year of teaching that this mind set was what set brilliant teachers apart from the others.

But then I asked myself how am I going to do this? How am I going to evaluate learning effectively? How am I going to develop my students’ skills in self regulation? How will I lead my faculty in doing this?

This is where SOLO comes in. SOLO can be used to develop learning intentions and success criteria for units of work. Learning intentions are the aims of a lesson (or series of lessons) while success criteria are what students have to do to be successful in that lesson. The success criteria are classified by the SOLO taxonomy, which lets both the student and the teacher know how the student is progressing and adjust the teaching and learning process accordingly. The book Using SOLO as a framework for Teaching has a process for teachers to develop units of work, including learning attentions and success criteria.  I have created some draft learning intentions and success criteria for the first units I’ll be teaching this year using the process from the book.

One star = uni/multistructural

Two stars = relational

Three stars = extended abstract

The success criteria let students know where they are now and where they are to go next. It lets students know what they need to do or know to demonstrate a surface level and deep level of understanding. It actually fits very nicely with the goals, medals and missions model of feedback.

What I have done is also use the SOLO-based learning intentions and success criteria to design PBL units of work. The success criteria shown above is part of a PBL unit based on the driving question “Sharks: Friends or Foes” where students have to make a critical judgement on the roles of sharks in an ecosystem and the impacts of sharks on humans. I have also created pre-tests and post-tests (some of these are short quizzes and some use the ‘letter-to-a-friend’ strategy) so that my students and I know whether learning has been effective. I will also be attempting to measure effect sizes.

For me SOLO ties together all those strategies I have tried before. They are no longer bits and pieces that I pluck out for different years for different classes. SOLO provides an anchor for me. For example, I can now say I am using games based learning/project based learning/etc for this because it will help my students move from uni/multistructural to extended abstract for these learning intentions. SOLO provides me (and hopefully my faculty in the near future) with a learning framework to base our discussions of learning and evaluation on.

I am also going to use SOLO-based learning intentions and success criteria to design programs for the Australian Curriculum.

So this year will be a journey into SOLO. Watch this space for updates 🙂

You want to do something cool? Let me get out of your way.

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This week, a member of my faculty asked me if they could a re-design a store room into a learning space. We have a large storeroom in between two classrooms which houses scientific equipment that we can move into another storage space. So this teacher thought if we could clear and clean up the space and find some tables and chairs, the space can be turned into a small learning space where small groups of students can do group work or where students can do quiet independent tasks while the main classroom can be used for other activities. This requires the removal of some cupboards and rearranging some equipment and storage devices. It’s a big task and will probably need few consecutive days of work, but this teacher has volunteered to do it in their holidays. I haven’t prompted this teacher in any way. They just wanted to do this. They want to work for free.

I did have some hesitation at the start for a few seconds. As a leader I often want to take control of a project, but I decided it was a great idea and gave them the freedom to do what they think was best for the space, as long as they updated me and briefly told me what they were doing. But otherwise they had free reign. I told this teacher, “I trust you’ll do a great job. This is a really good idea that would benefit student learning.”

This got me wondering – Why do we do work for free? As teachers, we often do a lot of work for free. Whether this is after work hours at home, on weekends or during the holidays, we are planning lessons, helping our students with extra tutorials or painting our classrooms. Not many other organisations have their workers working for free.

Then I remembered an animation based on Dan Pink’s talk on three factors that motivate people and lead to better performance and satisfaction.

In this talk, Pink talks about autonomy, mastery and purpose as the key factors that drive better performance. Interestingly, money does not motivate people to perform any better. Once you pay people enough so they are not worried about finances, autonomy, mastery and purpose are the main drivers. These three factors are also what drive innovation within an organisation. The teacher that wants to voluntarily come in during Christmas holidays to turn a store room into learning space isn’t getting paid any extra to do this. They are doing it because there is a personal sense of purpose. And I gave them the autonomy to do it. I got out of their way. Hopefully this will be the start of more innovations.

So next time someone wants to do something cool, get out of their way J

So, how did I do? Getting feedback from students in end-of-year evaluations

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While going through my Twitter feed a couple of weeks ago, I came across Bianca Hewe’s blog post on gaining feedback from students in order to improve your teaching. My year 7 class this year, which I have taught for English, Maths, Science, Geography and History, have been completing weekly evaluations on how they have been progressing academically and in their project work each week. They have also competed end-of-term evaluations. I have always valued student feedback, mainly because I think they are the best judges of my teaching and are the best placed to provide me with advice on how I can improve my teaching and their learning. Also, I think it emphasises that the teacher is a learner as well. This year we have been using Geoff Petty’s goals, medals and missions model of feedback and have created an atmosphere that everyone always has something new to learn and something they can improve on. So asking for students to evaluate my teaching further emphasises the teacher as a learner and further enhances the feeling of a learning community for the class.

For the end-of-year evaluation, I decided to move away from my usual multiple choice ranking questions in Survey Monkey and modified the questions on Bianca’s posts instead. I thought having 10 short answer questions will give me a better insight this time, especially into the classroom atmosphere and the relationships that the students have formed with each other. So here are the 10 questions I asked my year7s, a summary of their responses and my reflections on their responses:

1. What was the nicest thing someone in our class did for you this year?

Year 7s said that the nicest thing their classmates did for them this year were to share food with them when they forgot recess or lunch, lend them equipment such as pens, helped them with maths and made them feel welcome. I think the integrated curriculum approach, where year 7s stay in the same group with the same teacher in the same classroom for 5 KLAs, have created a very close-knit learning community. My class works like a team. They look out for each other and help each other.

2. What was the most challenging part of our class for you?

Year 7s came up with a mixture of responses for this question. Some of their responses include working with others productively in projects, writing persuasive texts and maths. Not surprisingly, algebra came up very frequently as something they found challenging. To be fair, these year 7s are achieving at a much higher level than any other similar cohort that I have taught, but they have very high expectations of themselves.

3. If you could change one thing that happened in our class, what would it be?

Seating plans and the design of the classroom came up quite frequently in the responses. I have been experimenting with different arrangements of furniture in the classroom that will allow students to easily move furniture to suit different types of activities. I haven’t got it down perfect. Some of the things I have difficult are the placement of students in a way that minimises disruptions and also allows everyone to have a clear view of the main presentation areas (students have a seating plan for most activities and are allowed to choose where they sit and rearrange the furniture during PBL activities).

4. What are three things you did this year to help your classmates?

The responses here are very similar to question 1.

5. What is something that was hard for you at the start of the year, but is easier now?

Algebra, science and maths in general were the most frequent responses. I am very pleased with them saying they find science easier now as I have spent a lot of effort on the pedagogy of their science activities (eg. Using SOLO as a framework).

6. What is your favourite part of our Integrated Curriculum lessons? Why?

Games based learning and project based learning were the response from almost every student. The reasons they gave ranged from learning being fun to being able to work in a team to having choice and being creative.

7. What is something you taught your teacher or classmates this year?

They taught me a lot of things this year. I never knew you could freeze an image on the IWB until a boy showed me where to press on the remote.

 

8. Which project did you learn the most from? Why?

Overwhelmingly, students said the Minecraft project was the favourite. I was expecting them to say “because it’s Minecraft” as their reasons, but none of the reason referred to using Minecraft at all. They all said they learnt a lot about ratios and the history of the Parthenon.

9. What are some things Ms Leung could have done to make this year better for you?

The responses to this question varied. Quite a few students said more laptops in class. We had 12 laptops between 30 students. What I’m worried about is that they will have no laptops in class next year and will possibly be the first group of students to experience the end of DER. We have experienced so many technology-rich learning experiences which are authentic 21st century learning experiences and next year we will go backwards.

10. What advice would you give to students who will be Ms Leung’s class next year?

I was very surprised at the responses at this question. Being 155cm and just having my personality, I have often lacked the ability to “scare” students into behaving. I rely very heavily on building a rapport with students and good learning design to manage their behaviour. However, the responses to this question from year 7s indicate that they see me as someone having very high expectations for their behaviour. Their responses include “always follow her instructions”, “don’t be rude” and “don’t ever take your phone out without her permission”.

Top 5 lessons learnt in 2012

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As the school year of 2012 draws to a close, it is time to look back at the year and reflect on what I have learnt.

Here are the top 5 lessons I have learnt as learner and leader:

Lesson #5 – It’s all about students and learning

I have always put my students’ learning first but this year I had the opportunity to work with a group of amazing year 7 students for 14 hours a week. So instead of the traditional high school way of having students in separate hour blocks, I had the got to learn with my year 7 class for continuous blocks of time. I taught this year 7 class for English, Maths, Science, Geography and History and it has allowed me to explore the following:

  • Project based learning that are all cross-curricular
  • Games based learning
  • Various ways of providing student feedback including Geoff Petty’s goals, medals and missions
  • How learning spaces can be and should be used to complement teacher instruction and student activities
  • How to create an online learning community

Overall this year really allowed me to focus on learning and students as individual learners rather than pushing content. Having to teach year 7 in this way almost killed me and this year has been even harder than my first year of teaching in terms of workload pressures. But I learnt a lot.

Lesson #4 – It’s not enough to be a hard worker with good ideas

To be an effective leader, you need to do more than just work hard. I always knew that, but this year I have implemented quite a few changes in my faculty. Some of it have been really successful while others have not been as successful as I would have liked. From these experiences I have learnt that:

  •  Sometimes it is necessary to move in baby steps
  • Teachers need to be brought into a learning journey for significant change to occur, tailored to their individual professional learning needs.
  • Not everything can be done at once. I’m one of those impatient people who like to just do everything in one go, but that isn’t always feasible and if it was, it might not be productive for others. I learnt that it’s usually better to do one or two things each week that lead to bigger changes.

 

Lesson #3 – Look after yourself

One of the things I struggled with this year was a healthy work-life balance. Year 7 integrated curriculum and other aspects of work took up much more of my time and effort in comparison to previous years that it did affect my physical health. At times I wasn’t eating as well as I should have been or exercising as much as I should have been. While the workload wasn’t forced upon me by anyone except myself. As I write this post, I am recovering from a rather bad case of the flu. It has probably become worse because I knew I was sick but still went to school for two days because there were things “that had to be done”. While the ultimate aim of my work was to improve student learning, I was reminded that we need to look after ourselves in order to look after others when I read this post by Summer Howarth.

 

Lesson #2 – Believe

Believe in yourself! I have learnt this year that my opinions, my gut feelings and my knowledge is just as valid as others with a bigger reputation, more experience, etc. Don’t get me wrong. I value, respect and sought the expertise from these people but in the end I know my students, my team of teachers and my school context best.

 

Lesson #1 – I have the best job in the world 🙂

Not much need to be explained about this lesson. I work in the best school. I work with the best team of teachers in my faculty. I work with very awesome students.

The iPony, an analogy in leading others to adopting innovative practices

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I have just completed a learning journey in Prague. I was one of the very lucky teachers who were invited to be part of the 2012 Microsoft Partners in Learning Global Forum. In this forum were over 100 teachers from all around the world. Each teacher had a project that was considered to be innovative. These projects pushed the boundaries and many used technology to transform teaching and learning.

While it is all well and good that students of these 100 teachers get to have exciting learning experiences, many students are still experiencing the status quo. How can we lead other teachers into using technology to transform student learning? How can we lead other teachers to design learning for the 21st century? Teacher resistance often comes up as a barrier. IMHO I like the term “resistance”. I don’t think teachers are actively resisting new approaches. It is not as simple as that. All teachers want the best for their students. To explore this I am going to use the iPhone as an analogy.

I currently own an iPhone and I am heading towards the end of my phone contract. I can choose the stay with Apple and upgrade to an iPhone 5 or move to an Android or Windows phone. At the moment I am very confident in using my iPhone for my needs. My iPhone is synced to other applications I use often and it is synced to my iPad. I use it to organise almost every aspect of my work. I have experimented and tweaked my iPhone over the years and made it work exactly how I want for my needs. It will take much more than a phone shop staff member to show me an Android or Windows phone to convince me to switch. Why should I let go of something that works for me for something else I don’t know how to use and may not do what I need it to do? The new phone could be great, but it might not. It is a massive risk to take.

My iPhone story is similar to why some teachers are hesitant to adopt a different way of designing their learning. Their way of teaching is like their iPhone. They have spent time and effort to learning, experimenting and tweaking the way they design learning for their students. Their way of doing things has worked for them.

A teacher with an innovative learning design is in some way like a phone shop staff member, trying to convince a long-term iPhone user to switch to an Android or Windows phone. If I was the teacher being convinced I would ask these questions:

  • What are the advantages of this new way of learning design over what I currently have?
  • How does this fit in with the way I do things in my classroom?
  • How complicated will this be for me and my students?
  • Can I experiment with it it first? Can I try a version of it and see how it works for me?
  • Who else is doing this?

These questions are from Rogers’ 5 factors of diffusion of innovations and are asked by consumers before they decide to adopt a new technology. Are these questions considered when new practices are being showcased to teachers? There is little point in running professional learning sessions one after the other on innovative practices if teachers feel that it is too complicated or see little advantage over their current practices.

Leaders need to take teachers on a learning journey. We can’t just continue to show and tell teachers about teaching approaches they are unfamiliar with without considering their individual professional journeys. Just like a lot of people won’t just stroll in and buy an Android to replace their iPhone because a person say it’s better, teachers wouldn’t adopt a new way of teaching without many experiences that convinces them it’s the right way to go for them and their students.

Learning about learning from the London Underground

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I am currently on holidays in London. London is a fairly easy city to get around if you speak English fluently, but I have an extremely bad sense of direction (I sometimes still get lost in my hometown of Sydney). I am just someone who just takes a little longer when getting my bearings with a new place.

I am in London with my partner. He has an extremely good sense of direction and learns his way around new places quickly.In London, he has been the one leading the way from our hotel to the nearest underground station, Southwark. He has been the one figuring out which stations we need to change at and which colour lines we need to go on. I’ve just been daydreaming while following him. Even though I have walked from the hotel to the Southwark station many times, I wouldn’t be able to tell you how to get there. I looked like I knew what I was doing, and I was successful at getting from A to B, but really I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t even bother looking at or carrying a map of the Tube, because I knew I didn’t have to use it. I can just follow my partner.

Today my partner was sick. While he was resting in the hotel room, I ventured out into London city by myself for the first time. The first thing I noticed was that there were orange light poles that pointed to where Southwark station was, telling you when to keep walking straight and when to turn a corner. I never noticed these before. I made it to Southwark station without getting lost at all. I wanted to get to the British Natural History Museum and worked out I needed to change at Westminster station for the green district line. I was much more aware of signs that gave clues to where I was supposed to go. If I was with my partner, I would never have noticed those signs because there was no need to notice them.

This experience has made me reflect on the way I have designed learning for some of my students. Some students generally take more time to do some things (like how I am with learning new directions). This may be team work, a mathematical concept or extended writing. In these situations many teachers, including myself, often hold our students’ hands and lead them from A to B; just like how I was led from A to B. We give our students scaffolds that tell them exactly what to do. We work through questions in worksheets as a whole class so all students have to do is copy the answers from the board or write down what they heard from another student. Students look like they know what they are doing, but really they were like me, just following someone who knows what they are doing.

But what if we just let our students get from A to B by themselves? Why are we so scared of letting them find their own way? They might take a little longer, or take the wrong turn and have to double back. Instead of assigning an extended writing task and giving them a scaffold straight away, why don’t we let students figure it out by themselves, but provide the clues for them. Figuring out something by yourself is one of the most powerful learning experiences. How can we design learning experiences that allow our students to do that? How can we design learning experiences that strike a balance between giving students the freedom to discover things for themselves and enough guidance so that they are set up for success?

Rocking with Smarties

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The rock cycle is often a boring topic for middle school students. In NSW, Australia, students learn about the rock cycle in year 7 or year 8. Many students also don’t fully grasp the rock cycle because it is something they can’t see happening in front of them and they can’t picture the long time scale (millions of years) in their minds.

I have often used food to make the rock cycle more interesting (see my previous post using cake to learn about the structure of the Earth). So when I came across this prac activity on using chocolate to model the rock cycle, I couldn’t resist. I used Smarties to model the rock cycle with my year 7 class. Here are some photos.

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My year 7s loved it. Some boys who usually vocalise very clearly they found this topic boring were the most eager to show me the chocolate sedimentary rocks they made. “Miss, when we placed the textbooks to squash the Smarties. That’s like compaction but we did it in a really short amount time, right?”, said one of these boys. They had fun and learnt a quite abstract and complex concept at the same time. What more can you ask for as a teacher?

I did modify the worksheet slightly to include the benefts and limitations of scientific models.

If you are planning to do this activity with your class, have a hand-held vacuum cleaner ready. No matter how careful kids are, there will be chocolate crumbs everywhere.

Professional learning – a journey

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Many faculties at my school purchased iPads to be used as student devices this term. Our aim is to use these iPads in combination with the other ICT tools we have already (1:1 laptops, interactive whiteboards, flip cams, etc) to further move into 21st century leaning.

I am now in the process of organising teacher professional learning to make sure that teachers can maximise the learning benefits of these iPads. To do this I have been browsing through many blogs and websites that detail how others have done this. Many of these blogs and sites contain information like “102 ways to use your iPad in the classroom”. In the professional learning I have attended for iPads, they have also mainly focused on apps. Now that’s all well and good as teachers need to know what apps are out there, which apps have been tried by teachers and how they have used those apps in their classrooms. According to this article, there are four stages to teachers’ integration of technology in teaching learning:

Stage 1  – Preliterate end users – Teachers with minimal experience with the technology – The challenge here is to help these teachers see the benefits of technology in making their classroom instruction and administration easier

Stage 2 – Software technicians – Teachers who have used apps, software and/or the piece of technology for personal use

Stage 3 – Electronic traditionalists – Teachers proficient in using technology to extend traditional classroom instruction such as electronic worksheets and drill and practice quizzes

Stage 4 – Techno-constructivists – Teachers who utilises technology to allow students to construct their own understanding, create products and solve problems

At the moment I think I do stage 1, 2 and 3 quite well when I design professional learning for other teachers. However stage 4 is much trickier. How can I design professional learning that will help teachers on a journey to become techno-constructivists? It will require teachers to confront and reflect on their perspectives of how students learn, which are framed by many previous experiences and assumptions.

How would you approach this? Have you done this before? Share your ideas and thoughts 🙂