This is an example of a SOLO Taxonomy Question Chain. A series of connected questions that explores a subconcept.
Follow each row, and you will see each question using the language and verbs associated with the SOLO Taxonomy levels.
Here is some of the context for creating this set of questions:
Curriculum Focus Daily and seasonal changes in our environment affect everyday life ACSSU004
Achievement Standard By the end of Kindergarten, they suggest how the environment affects them and other living things.
Sub-concepts to Explore Types of weather + causes, seasons and seasonal weather changes, the impact of weather on human behaviour, clothes that we choose to suit the weather, the impact of weather on animals, environmental patterns.
I stumbled on this post from Jamie Portman about building better relationships. He, in turn, was re-sharing a document from L30 Relational Systems that outlines 33 ideas to think about when valuing relationships.
This is still one of the most important docs for anyone working in schools!!
My favourites:
3. Make regular deposits into the social capital bank.
9. Every child (and adult) needs a champion.
22. Catch ‘em getting it right more than you catch ‘em getting it wrong. https://t.co/UA2i3RlVGC
Jamie shared a couple of ideas that resonated and thought I would do the same. Here is what sticks out to me.
11. The language we use creates the reality we experience + 12. The language we use to describe an experience often becomes the experience.
I am always conscious of the language that we are using. It can make ideas accessible to everyone or put up a barrier. Paying attention to the different types of language we use and how much of it is shared is an essential step towards changing a culture.
When another person speaks, we’re usually “listening” at one of four levels. We may be ignoring another person, not really listening at all. We may practice pretending. “Yeah. Uh-huh. Right.” We may practice selective listening, hearing only certain parts of the conversation. We often do this when we’re listening to the constant chatter of a preschool child. Or we may even practice attentive listening, paying attention and focusing energy on the words that are being said. But very few of us ever practice the fifth level, the highest form of listening, empathic listening.
Empathic listening is something we can all get better at. I have from continual practice – centre on the speaker, active presenteeism, use their words back to them.
28. Speak only if it improves the silence (Gandhi)
We have so few opportunities to reflect and think in our busy lives. Thinking time is a scarce commodity – especially in discussion and dialogue. I try and build in individual thinking time to most developmental activities ahead of group sharing – it always helps.
Another robust protocol inline with this is the idea of WAIT or Why Am I Talking? A potent reminder about the value we may or may not be adding to the talk.
One of my favourite maxims and something I wrote down when I started Dialogic Learning is to
“Listen twice as much as you talk.”
One of the strengths of this and the Why Am I Talking? protocol is that it encourages us to carefully reflect on what we are sharing and think about our thinking.
Any habits and protocols that encourage us to slow down a little are precious at improving the quality of our dialogue and discussion — in turn, improving the quality of our relationships.
18. There are always three truths, my truth, your truth and the truth
When I read this, I think about the time I have considered someone else’s perspective or attempted to challenge assumptions about the way things are. Seeking a shared truth is so important in relationships.
I might consider an idea relatively non-threatening, but someone else will bring their lense and bias to it – perhaps feeling anxiety and fear.
Their perception is their truth.
This connects with our need to increase our empathy quotient (another type of EQ, perhaps) if we are to build better relationships. First of all, we have to be aware that the person we are with sees what we see differently. Then perhaps we can find a way to share the truth with them.
When we see the world through the power of relationships it:
allows us to see the people around us not as enemies or as mere instruments to our success, but as allies in our journey. We are human beings, not “human resources”.
Paolo Gallo – Why positive relationships at work matter more than you think
Have a look at the full list and let me know in the comments below, what resonates with you the most.
In this post, I want to introduce you to a Learning Alignment Model that I have developed with some of my partner schools over the last few years.
It is not a step by step process to design learning, but more of a high-level thinking model to engage with that uncovers some interesting potential tensions in our classroom work.
As you will see the model also helps explain a little about the line of sight from whole school strategy through to the actual process of learning.
Starting Points
There have been a few sources of inspiration for this Learning Alignment Model.
First would be the work of Dylan Wiliam and his simple, yet a powerful, statement that “children do not learn what we teach.” In explaining this Wiliam refers to the work of Denvir and Brown (1986) who explored the developmental path of learning number concepts with 7-9-year-olds.
Wiliam explains that despite targeted instruction children do not learn what we teach. You can access a webinar here in which Dylan Wiliam explains this in more detail, have a look from the 01:48 mark.
This discrepancy and unpredictability remain a powerful provocation. It is something that I experienced throughout my teaching, but I never stopped to question or reflect why. This model helps to surface that provocation.
The second instigation is the various definitions of curriculum. When you explore the work of curriculum development, various sub-sets of the curriculum emerge. For example these eight ideas:
The recommended curriculum derives from experts in the field. Almost every discipline-based professional group has promulgated curriculum standards for its field.
The written curriculum is found in the documents produced by the state, the school system, the school, and the classroom teacher, specifying what is to be taught.
The supported curriculum is the one for which there are complimentary instructional materials available, such as textbooks, software, and multimedia resources.
The tested curriculum is the one embodied in tests developed by the state, school system, and teachers. The term “test” is used broadly here to include standardized tests, competency tests, and performance assessments.
The taught curriculum is the one that teachers actually deliver. Researchers have pointed out that there is enormous variation in the nature of what is actually taught, despite the superficial appearance of uniformity (Gehrke, Knapp, & Sirotnik, 1992).
The learned curriculum is the bottom-line curriculum—what students learn. Clearly, it is the most important of all.
In addition, there is often reference to the hidden curriculum (a term coined by Jackson, 1968) is the unintended curriculum-what students learn from the school’s culture and climate. And the excluded curriculum is what has been left out, either intentionally or unintentionally.
This model of curriculum design and development is at the core of my own model.
A final core provocation for me was the concept of Constructive Alignment from John Biggs the author of the SOLO taxonomy. He explains:
In constructive alignment, we start with the outcomes we intend students to learn and align teaching and assessment to those outcomes.
The idea of alignment provides an accelerant for how these parts work together. I wanted to create something that combined the three concepts and focused more on the learning experience than just the curriculum.
I share it as an ongoing work in progress and I would be grateful for your comments and critique.
When you review the model I want you to take into account a few ideas about how it might be used and thought about.
Supporting Notes and Explanations
It deliberately emphasises learning over assessment or curriculum.
Instead of saying planning I have used “Designed Learning” as I think this is richer articulation of what needs to occur. Start with the learner.
I felt I needed to add the word “Experience” in to the upper levels to distinguish from the core level of “Learning” at the base.
There is a connection between a broader whole school vision statement (Conceptual) and the designed learning. How each classrooms aligns itself to those core values and how that flows down to the learning that occurs.
As you move down the model there is less control. We can write visions statements down and collaborate on learning design, but as soon as those ideas are enacted there are more variables.
There can be a big difference between what we design, what we teach and what the actual student experience ends up being. This was highlighted to me recently when a young teacher reviewed some video of her lesson introduction and realised how much she was talking. Her perception of that was very different than the actual experience students had.
The base level Learning was added later as the model developed as I wanted to include the cognitive process we do not see. How do we know that learning has happened? In order to be able to better understand this we need better proxies for learning. This leads to discussions about assessment design which is a bridge between instruction and learning.
Write these out on cards and consider how they pair together and influence each other. Explore how they are sometimes aligned and sometimes very much disconnected.
There is a major assumption inherent in the model that better alignment = better learning. I am not sure this is always true. Sometimes great learning happens when we least expect it and often when we do not plan or design for it. Does all learning have to be designed?
This alignment could be different for every child. When we move the model from curriculum and design to learning, we have to consider the actual experience and change in long term memory will be different for every student.
Here is the model in plain text format.
Conceptual Learning Experience
Vision statement / teaching and learning principles or frameworks
Designed Learning Experience
Planning and programming / Curriculum documentation
Enacted Learning Experience
Teaching and facilitation
Actual Learning Experience
The student’s direct experience of teaching and learning
Learning
Changes in long term memory
To finish, I want to share some summary questions that you can use when exploring the model and that act as further provocations for thinking about the design of learning.
Accompanying Questions and Provocations
How do you know that learning has occurred?
What can you do to better understand the student experience?
What is the difference between planning and designing?
What proxies for learning do we use?
How does the student experience of learning align with what our community values the most?
How is every learning experience an expression of what we are striving to achieve as a whole school?
How can we make the best use of unexpected teachable moments with the same rigour as those that we design?
How might we use formative assessment to bridge between teaching and learning?
How can we improve our skills in assessment design?
I still have plenty of areas I want to explore with this model and I would be delighted to hear your reaction and response.
I had the opportunity to work with a primary school leadership team in Sydney today. The team at St Christopher’s in Panania are a partner school of mine and I support in a critical friend type role.
We spent some time today exploring the concepts associated with “proxies for learning” using my recent blog post about it as a starting point.
In short the concept of a proxy is that we focus on a representation of learning – we are not looking at learning itself.
Again the discussion centred on the idea of creating better proxies and what the limits are. We had a range of questions that helped to explore this topic:
How might we design better proxies for learning?
Can we describe the proxies we have been using in our own practice?
If we were observing learning taking place what would we actually be looking at?
How might we design a proxy that is closest to the location of learning?
What is the evidence of learning?
Is this evidence of performance or learning?
How might we recognise when learning is taking place?
An interesting challenge to me from the team was that an example I used to explain a proxy was in fact a proxy. I have heard myself say something like “We might only look at learning if we could scan the brain or have a mobile MRI or CT scanner.”
But of course the results of such scans are just proxies for the real thing. Peeling back the skull and directly observing the neuro-chemical process is the truth. Everything else is a proxy.
So when we consider that everything we do is a proxy for learning at a neuro-chemical level, we must shift our energy to the quality of the proxy.
You might also describe it in terms of the fidelity of the proxy – the quality , authenticity and standard of the representation of learning.
My friend Chris also suggested that self reflection and a learner’s self proclamation is the highest standard:
The proxy which is closest to source must be the reflective learner’s self proclamation “I’ve learned!” Maybe we should enable that voice more and listen to it. #proxy
But I am not sure if greater proximity to a synapse is best? There seems to be lots of bias associated with the self-assessment of learning.
David Didau offers a reminder about the complexity of learning and a list of ideas for better proxies:
Obviously, we don’t really know how, when or why learning happens, but we do have some guides about what might make it more or less likely.
So, here I tentatively offer a list of other possible ‘good proxies’ for learning which may help teachers plan and look for opportunities to increase students’ mastery of curriculum content.
Learning may happen when students:
concentrate on relevant examples and non-examples
retrieve what they have been taught in previous lessons
apply concepts to new examples
engage in practice drills (which may involve repetition or formulas and procedures)
answer questions without cues or prompts
What do you think about this list? What do you consider a high quality, high fidelity or just a good proxy?
This exploration has also led me to wonder more and more about retrieval over time. Sometimes learning might not occur in the timeframe we expect it to and only after a shift in time. More to ponder.
I am not with my son anymore. The last time I was here in Sydney I was with George. It was the final few weeks of his time in Year 6, last year, and I brought him on a work trip.
We had some great father-son time together and he got out into the world!
This is my first trip of 2018, I have been working in Melbourne over the last few weeks so that I could be around, as he settles into a new pattern of life and learning at high school. More on that in future posts.
It is always tough being away from home. Travelling for work has no silver lining.
The only sliver of a glint of a glimpse of such decadent lining is in the relationships and friendships I have with the people I work with in Sydney. Friends and colleagues who make me welcome and who know my family are not far from my thoughts.
It is no real surprise that relationships are at the centre of so much great learning in our schools. It is the very same for my work. I have been working with schools in Sydney, and especially in the Catholic Diocese, in different ways for nearly 6 or 7 years.
Long standing partnerships and friendships are the foundations for my work.
How is your work different when you are collaborating with colleagues and friends you have known for a long time?
