Why SOLO Taxonomy? Answers from Year 1 learners.

Who better to tell us about how SOLO Taxonomy can help make next learning steps visible, than the learners who use it?

The context (yesterday): I asked my learners to think about something they can do now, that they couldn't do when they first started school. What was something they were 'Prestructural' at?  I then asked them how they thought they had learned to 'do' it? We use 'Think, Pair, Share' to allow time to process thoughts and encourage more learners to articulate their ideas (I find this especially helpful for ELLs).

The following are responses that learners wrote in books following our discussion. I encourage them to write; a specific genre or text type is not expected. Learners are familiarised with genre and text types through our reading programme. These responses have been typed exactly as they were written.

"If you just started at school and you don't know what to do, you will need help. Then you know a little bit more about your learning. Then you'll be up to Multistructural. Then you'll be up to relational then you can tell other people how to do it and you will be up to Extended Abstract." (Year 1)

"SOLO Taxonomy helps my learning. I do it step by step to learn. I like learning with SOLO Taxonomy. SOLO Taxonomy goes, I don't know, then I know one thing, then I know more than one thing, after that I link my ideas, then I show other people my ideas if you are really good at doing stuff like Miss Casse is. She can show us her skills and then our skills will be better. Miss Casse is an adult, we are children. She tells us sometimes but sometimes we tell her how to spell words too." (Year 1)

"SOLO helps you to learn your reading and writing and go up the reading ladder. SOLO is good for you and it is awesome for your learning because it helps you to know what to do." (Year 1)

We have visual references to SOLO Taxonomy all over our room; above the small modelling whiteboard, on the walls, HookEd Visual Rubrics http://pamhook.com/free-resources/downloadable-resources/ on the tables, and specific rubrics displayed for most of our learning goals.We talk about 'what' and 'how' we are learning frequently so it becomes simply 'what they do'. They quickly adopt SOLO language of learning, the symbols, and more importantly, what they stand for. I find it really helps them to know how to give each other specific feedback about their learning goals when they share work with each other.

If you have any feedback or feedforward for my awesome learners, please comment and I will share it with them!