MIT Tool Development - SOLO For Student Talk

My focus for my MIT journey is to gather and use student voice collected from interviews, written reflections, classroom oral reflections and student blogs alongside student achievement data, to establish links between the quality of student voice and improved student achievement.

I planned to create a tool, using SOLO taxonomy, to measure the quality of student talk. I wanted to create a tool that could be used to gather measurable data, so that shift could be seen, monitored and celebrated as part of the story of improved learning for target students. I was particularly interested in doing this, as it is often challenging to demonstrate shift using  normed assessment tools. Teachers will often observe changes in engagement and improved student talk during learning that assessment data does not show. These teacher observations form an invaluable part of the narrative of target student progress.

I have been gathering student talk about learning, as part of our class reflective journal since the beginning of the year. Our “NZ Enterprise 2019 Kea Class Captain’s Log” records afternoon plenary sessions. The students take turns with being the Captains. Those of you that are familiar with Star Trek, will understand the concept! I act as the recorder of the entry notes as the captains use named stick in a jar to randomly select students to answer questions and prompts about their learning from the day.

Initially my idea was to create some way of analysing statements using SOLO vocabulary, with a particular focus on verbs and adjectives used to describe learning. After the Sydney conference, I realised that I was over complicating what I needed to do. I had forgotten the KISS principle!

I then thought of developing a simple rubric to unpack what the learning talk might look like/ sound like at each SOLO stage. I developed a simple Google Sheet to record this data over time. I then used my trial rubric to analyse student statements from our class, and record it in the data sheet to track progress for individual students. I took these tools to our MIT session in Auckland to share with the rest of the MIT team.