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What I learned in my visit to King Solomon Academy Part 2 – The Lemov lecture

2014-09-12T13:57:31+01:00September 12th, 2014|Featured|

When I reported my observations about King Solomon Academy, a number of commentators pointed out the similarities to some of the Charter Schools in the US. Any similarity is the Charter model, particularly the KIPP schools (Knowledge is Power Programme) share many of the same aims, values and structures as KSA. Although I've never visited one of these schools I was aware of the influence they've had on a number of English Free Schools and Academies. How synchronous then Doug Lemov, managing director of the Uncommon Schools network in New York state and author of the highly influential, Teach Like a Champion: [...]

What I learned in my visit to King Solomon Academy Part 1

2018-10-24T17:55:35+01:00September 11th, 2014|Featured|

Yesterday I wangled a visit to the latest ministerial touchstone for excellence in English education, King Solomon Academy just off the Edgware Road in Westminster. The Ark sponsored academy has the dubious privilege of being situated in the most deprived, socially disadvantaged ward in London. 12% are on the SEN register; 51% are in receipt of free school meals and 65% speak English as a second language. They can hardly be accused as cherry picking the most able. And yet it achieves some of most astonishing GCSE results recorded this summer with 93% of pupils getting 5 good grades including English and Maths and 75% obtaining [...]

Why I changed my mind about the SOLO taxonomy

2017-01-25T23:25:31+00:00June 15th, 2014|learning|

I've been meaning to write this for quite a while. Increasingly, I've become rather embarrassed about my erstwhile advocacy for Biggs & Collis's generic taxonomy, the Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes. I used to have a separate page of SOLO resources on my blog which I have now removed, but even so my SOLO posts still get a surprising number of hits, and this presentation has been downloaded over 50,000 times. If you've got 8 minutes of your life you want to waste, there's also this video of me extolling the efficacy of SOLO at a teachmeet in 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4h1nOdnXDI I was [...]

Is SOLO a waste of time?

2012-06-04T00:09:07+01:00June 4th, 2012|learning, SOLO|

Stop blaming your lack of experimentation, risk and innovation on your lack of time. Hywel Roberts - Oops! Helping Children Learn Accidentally It was pointed out to me recently that I can afford to expend my energies on such fripperies as the SOLO taxonomy and group work because I teach a subject which is rich in curriculum time. If, the logic goes, you only have 1 or 2 hours per week you need to spend it delivering content. Anything else is a waste of time. Clearly there's some truth in this: English does get more time than, say, French or RE. [...]

SOLO taxonomy training

2015-07-16T10:22:23+01:00January 30th, 2012|SOLO, training|

UPDATE: I no longer think SOLO taxonomy is worth spending any time on. Here is why. A few weeks ago I rather rashly offered to present on SOLO taxonomy to the North Somerset Aspire network. As always with this sort of foolishness it's made me consider my understanding of the subject in a lot more depth. Before the Summer I'd never even heard of it. But since then the whole world (or at least the very narrow teaching geek world I inhabit) has exploded with SOLO fever. Tait Coles and Darren Mead have done their best to help me understand some [...]

Going SOLO

2011-10-05T23:22:52+01:00October 5th, 2011|learning, SOLO|

A few months ago I wrote about some of the concerns people have had with ubiquity of Bloom's Taxonomy and that there were other, perhaps more useful taxonomies around. Well, since then I've been quietly experimenting with SOLO (Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes) developed by Biggs and Collis. Biggs says As learning progresses it becomes more complex. SOLO, is a means of classifying learning outcomes in terms of their complexity, enabling us to assess students’ work in terms of its quality not of how many bits of this and of that they got right. At first we pick up only one or few aspects of the task [...]

An argument for order

2020-07-07T21:23:03+01:00October 24th, 2018|behaviour|

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy within a system will always increase over time. What starts off as order descends, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but inexorably into chaos. In simple words: everything deteriorates over time. Fending off chaos and bolstering order requires continual effort and careful maintenance. Whatever else it is, a school is a system. The orderly running of schools is something most people take completely for granted, but the balance between order and chaos, especially in secondary schools, is precarious. As they become teenagers, children begin to desire greater independence and autonomy. They believe themselves ready [...]

Getting culture right Part 1: Normative messages

2017-08-02T15:25:28+01:00August 2nd, 2017|behaviour, psychology|

If you want to change anything within a school, culture is crucial. As Tom Bennett argues in Creating a Culture: How school leaders can optimise behaviour, culture is "the way we do things round here". His advice to school leaders is to purposely design the culture you want in your school and then work hard to communicate your vision so that it becomes something that lives in the minds of everyone within the school community. Easy to say, hard to do. Any attempt to change culture has to start with acknowledging and then shifting what's considered socially normal. If the social norm [...]

How helpful is Hattie & Donoghue’s model of learning? Part 1: The problem with depth

2020-07-01T20:49:37+01:00June 17th, 2017|learning|

I saw John Hattie speak recently at a conference on his latest re-imagining of his Visible Learning work. He was an excellent speaker and charming company. I was particularly flattered that he asked me to sign his copy of my What if... book. After he'd finished his presentation he asked me what I thought and I said I'd have to go away and have a think. This is an attempt to tease out a response. Broadly, I found myself in agreement. Hattie makes the astute point that the 400 learning strategies identified in his most recent meta analysis cannot be directly compared; [...]

Bottom sets and the scourge of low-level disruption

2016-11-14T21:10:57+00:00November 14th, 2016|behaviour|

In many English schools, low-level disruption is the norm. Children talking when expected to be silent, fiddling with equipment and each other, calling out, and generally not being 'on task' are all routinely accepted as just something with which teachers have to contend. In 2014, Ofsted published this report on low-level disruption in schools. It it, "around two-fifths of the 723 teachers in the survey who believed that disruptive ‘talking and chatting’ was a key problem said it occurred in almost every lesson." The entire concept of 'behaviour management' is predicated on the idea that teachers must manage students' inevitable disruptive [...]

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