#ililc4 Musings - Samantha Broom's SOLO Taxonomy in MFL

SOLO has been somewhat of a hot topic in education in recent years (during my RQT training 2 years ago we were asked to look at it and it came up again during a school inset day a few months back). The problem I always had with SOLO was that I found it was just a case of creating labels for something that most of our lessons do, or at least I felt that way about MFL. The nature of teaching our subject means we have to start each topic, each scheme of work, right back down at word level, build it up to forming sentences and then eventually text level to show some progression. That is quite frustrating for a KS4 class and demands a lot of a teacher in terms of creative ways to introduce vocabulary. I guess that is another reason why we have been experimenting so much with flipped learning lately.

What I really appreciated about Samantha Broom's (@spanishsam) talk at the #ilic4 conference last weekend is that she said right from the outset that she doesn't bother too much with the labels. I am absolutely useless at names for things (don't ask me to explain the difference between the imperfect and preterite, you will have to remind me which one is which first) and I hate the idea of creating a contrived classroom situation in which you would have to break the flow of a target language led lesson to explain to pupils that we are now moving from 'unistructural' to 'multistructural'. The pupils probably don't care too much about the name of what they are doing as long as they are learning (and then again there are some who don't partiulary mind if they aren't doing much of that either!). After explaining what the labels meant, Sam gave us a chance in pairs to describe a grammar point using the stages of SOLO.  Eleanor and I come up with this for regular present tense verb endings:

Prestructural: No idea what a verb even is or why I need one

Unistructural: I know a couple of infintives

Multistructural: I know there are some endings I need to use but I haven't tried that yet

Relational: I can apply my newly learnt pattern of endings to verbs that you give me

Extended Abstract: I can apply my endings to a number of regular verbs and use these correctly

We discussed that for us in MFL, vocab learning puts us frequently among the first three stages of SOLO Taxonomy - 1. students have to cover a set topic; 2.they don't know the vocab they need for that topic so we teach them it; 3. they begin to commit this vocab to their memory and finally; 4. we remove the scaffolding and let the pupils use the new words creatively by themselves. Personally, I feel that SOLO is much more valuable to the teacher toolkit in terms of planning for progression as opposed to engaging pupils with the terminology, in MFL at least. I will keep the stages in mind when planning lessons but I don't feel it is appropriate to share this with the students at the expense of target language in the classroom, especially if colleagues around school are using the techniques anyway. That is not to say that I believe we shouldn't share the aims and objectives of a lesson and / or series of lessons with a class, I do this on a daily basis, just that I won't be pointing out the name of the thinking processes behind it.

I really like this graphic for a more detailed explanation - interestingly, we are shown the 'verbs' for learning instead of nouns; a theme resonating the whole weekend at #ililc4. Apologies, no image credit - just from a Google search.

You can find Samantha's presentation here.

#ililc4 Musings - Joe Dale, Putting the Pedagogy into the Technology Sat 8th Feb

I think it is great that as teachers, the element of accountability we have means we seek to justify everything we do, every experiment we take part in with hard evidence, numbers or research to prove its worth. Joe Dale's session at this year's ILILC conference at the University of Southampton was all about the proof in the technology pudding, as he sought to whizz us through some of the theory behind the work a lot of us MFL teachers have been doing the last few years in introducing new technology to our classrooms. I'll summarise a few bits here.

Interestingly, since we had been discussing this at our lead practitioner's meeting this week, the work of Dr Carol Dweck came up. For those unfamiliar with her work, Dweck argues that there are two types of mindset; fixed and growth. A person of fixed mindset believes that our qualities are set; Growth mindset believes that we can ‘cultivate’ and change our qualities through effort. Does this explain student attitudes to learning? Students ‘believe’ their ability/intelligence, and therefore work only to fulfil the potential they think they have? And again, does that resonate with some teachers' views of technology in the classroom? There are those of us who are embracing the technological change and others who are resisting it, although of course I appreciate not all of those who aren't technology geeks like the rest of us are necessarily resisting it because of their mindset - some schools aren't as spoilt for choice with fancy gadgets like us. I really like this popular graphic by Nigel Holmes who has summarised the key differences.

But then for those of us that are of a growth mindset, what difference does it make if the tech we are exploiting isn't having an impact on the learning? Joe shared an image with us that I had seen floating around on Twitter before (the image appears to be attributed to a chap named Bill Ferriter, though I can't be sure). What do we want kids to do with the technology?

There has been many a debate on Twitter of late as to the role of teachers in the classroom and the stance they take - traditional chalk and talk or Web 2.0 and all the shiny whizzy new things happening. Whilst I can't claim to belong in either camp, feeling as I do that I have had the benefit at Wildern of outstanding colleagues with experience to both extents, I do believe we shouldn't be using technology merely for the sake of it. The above graphic serves as a good reminder that the learning process is more important than the file that ends up in your inbox after a lesson with the iPads booked out. This links very nicely to a post about SOLO Taxonomy in MFL which Samantha Broom led us through later that morning...