SOLO

Summer reading has been inspiring this year. I've been following Didau's blog and discussing the implementation of the SOLO taxonomy to lesson design with my colleague, the wonderful Jack Eiles.

Here's my version of the taxonomy:

By guiding pupils on how to progress from left to right, it is possible to elicit more sophisticated learning, where pupils are meta-cognitively more self-aware.

For example, Shakespeare... From the left, pupils are aware of facts about him, such as he worked as an actor, in Elizabethan London and wrote plays for the theater. Then ask the pupils how these relate to one another. Acting gave him insights into audience's responses, which fed back into his writing; or the verbal, as opposed to visual, culture of Elizabethan England meant sophisticated wordplay was valued, which fed back into his writing...

Then make links with literature more generally. The rich wordplay of his writing, as result of the links made earlier, together with his fame and influence have meant this has become a convention of sophisticated writing.

Using the taxonomy makes this kind of thinking much more explicit. 

Key Insight 2/5

Good group work adds 30 teaching assistants to the classroom.

Key Insight: 1/5

Say they're good and they are.

Half Term Plans

Key questions for focused lesson planning as part of a sequence of learning:

1. What did students learn last lesson and how will it relate to this lesson?
2. Which students do you need to consider in this particular lesson?
3. What will students do the moment they arrive?
4. What do you want students to learn and what activities will they undertake in order to learn it?
5. How will you (and they) know if they have made progress?

FISH

Competition: 500 word mini-saga entitled, 'FISH.'

Inspired by 'The Old Man and the Sea,' Hemingway's classic short novel about the conflict between humankind and nature, paste your 500 word mini-saga into the comment box for feedback.

Write it from the point of view of the man, or the fish...
 
Read the text at: The Old Man and the Sea

Toolbox

Specialist terminology is essential for all subjects. How can a scientist describe empirical phenomena with any precision without words like picometer - one trillionth of a meter - or tetraquark an exotic elementary particle?

Students of English need them, admirers of English hoard them, lovers of English use them.

But how often have you stood clueless in a supermarket aisle having forgotten your shopping list? They are inherently forgettable things, lists. Shopping lists eminently so. At least you can always default to the pizza cooler. 

The Toolbox is a resource I created to categorise English and literary critical terminology. Rather easier to envisage and recall than an alphabetical list of terms applicable to a heterogeneous array of language events (sorry got carried away with the particle physics discourse there) is this terminology toolbox.

It doesn't have a linguistic tool to fix every descriptive, analytical or discursive problem but it will keep your essays and extended responses on the road long enough to get to A* up to GCSE level.

Categories of language resource: The Pie

Early on in my training, I discovered many pupils are unclear as to the different categories of language that they are expected to analyse at all levels of study.

Commonly, teaching and learning resources built up over a number of years fail to make clear distinctions between categories of language.

I have seen many print resources and PowerPoints which make no distinction between, for example, persuasive devices from rhetoric, such as the rule-of-three, and acoustic devices such as alliteration. Language resources are merely presented as a selection of devices used 'for effect' and listed indiscriminately.

I resolved to create a simple categorisation tool to help pupils identify, describe and analyse the discrete types of language resource they regularly encounter in texts and which they can deploy in their own writing.

My solution is The Pie, which divides resources into their four main areas: vocabulary, figurative language, acoustic devices and rhetorical devices.

I encourage pupils to select their favourite kind of pie to personalise the mnemonic. Personally, I prefer home-made fruit pies and if I were forced to choose just one, it would probably be a tart blackcurrant with a sweet shortcrust pastry. What kind of pie do you like?