What Kind of Leaders Do You Want? Advice to New Senior Leaders. Starting to think again about Assessment for Learning. Ready with my boilerplate David Didau dangles a little nugget on Assessment for Learning in his post on Teacher Talk where he says, “ I’m even beginning to doubt the primacy of AfL!
” AfL has been gnawing away at the back of my mind too. I think it has become a victim of “robotic application” that Tom Sherrington describes in the post’s comments. I also think the time might be close to look again at what we are assessing and feeding back on. Getting students to be more involved in their own learning was identified as a key issue by the the Government in the late 1990′s. Feedback to any pupil should be about the particular qualities of his or her work, with advice on what he or she can do to improve, and should avoid comparisons with other pupils. While I would not take issue with any of these points, the following decade increasingly saw teachers delivering boilerplate lessons from templates, often in the form of planning or observation checklists.
SOLO Stations. There seems to an awful lot of excellent posts written about SOLO Taxonomy at the moment, which is obviously absolutely fantastic …..I just thought I’d best write one to keep up with the very high standard of reflection and sharing!
The idea for SOLO Stations came from a great blog post from @DVPLearning found here in the post Steven describes a Year 10 PE Revision lesson in which “He then explained what the next task was going to be. This is where teach, do, review comes in! Going SOLO: An introduction to the taxonomy everyone’s talking about. This article originally appeared in Innovate My School's September 2012 digital magazine.
The Structure of Observed Learning Outcome (SOLO) taxonomy aims to show pupils how to develop sophisticated responses to questions by getting them to examine their thought-process as their understanding of a topic improves. I began using SOLO in 2011, and it is now integral to my teaching. SOLO defines five stages of understanding for any topic: prestructural, unistructural, multistructural, relational and extended abstract. The first three involve gathering relevant information. The other two are about using that information: linking facts and findings, questioning existing ideas about the topic, and forming new theories. All well and good. SOLO LEVEL: PRESTRUCTURAL (the pupil has missed the point) Why we’ve got differentiation wrong. I hate the way that many of us teachers are encouraged to differentiate, and the way that many teachers understand the term.
In contemporary education, differentiation has, for many practitioners, become synonymous with “dumbing down”. Providing easier tasks for “weaker” students, displaying differentiated outcomes (especially of the “must, should, could” variety) and texts where “difficult” words have been removed or replaced to allow the “weakest” to read them, is all symptomatic of a lowering of expectations and the acceptance that many students just can’t access complex material. Outstanding teaching & learning: missed opportunities and marginal gains. I work at an ‘outstanding’ school where the teaching and learning is ‘good’. As such we are squarely in Wilshaw’s sights and almost certainly due an inspection at some point this year. We were last inspected in November 2011 but a lot of goal post moving has gone on in the intervening months. The new inspection framework is widely seen as a ravening beast out to devour schools that are not delivering to the lofty standards of our hero, the saviour of Mossbourne Academy.
Whizzy things. English Teaching. Transition. Pedagoo London presentation. Teacher talk: the missing link. Demonstrating instant progress in lesson. Marginal Learning Gains. Every teacher is involved in the complex business of fostering high aspirations in our learners.
Finding a practical way to do this through the learning that we design and how we deliver it can be incredibly challenging. It is true to say that to do so would constitute far more than a Marginal Learning Gain as if we are able to find a way to establish a highly aspirational culture in our lessons, then this has the potential to pervade whole-school culture. As always, striving for an aspirational culture, the Marginal Learning Gains can be found nestled deep inside what is meant by ‘aspiration’.
Constructing learning SO THAT it is meaningful and purposeful. Teaching Dropboxes. Imagine having a subject folder filled with handy resources, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel?
Now you don’t have to! Below is a list of shared Teaching Dropboxes – that is, a set of shared computer Folders and files, for and by teachers, storing original good practice. Whether these are critical documents, handy pro formas or stunning presentations – if they are useful for the subject, they are in! What they all have in common is a non-commercial share-alike copyright, meaning that anyone who contributes can share the documents, but must give credit and aren’t allowed to sell them. Simply request an invite, and start to share, contribute and enjoy the benefits of a subject in your pocket. If you are already using a shared Dropbox, or intend to, I would recommend a read of my guide to Sharing Dropbox etiquette.
#SLTDropbox For aspiring and existing SLT in schools. #ICTDropbox.