Week 7 Term 3 - The start of my Professional Practice Project

I have decided to use the SOLO Taxonomy designed by Pam Hook and Julie Mills to improve my practice as a teacher in designing and implementing a learning programme that will help my students to know themselves better as learners and to help them become reflective learners.
Just a little bit of background on why I have finally chosen this professional development design:
Pam and Julie are experiences consultants in teaching and learning and ICT.
They help teachers with developing pedagogoies that will support thinking and learning as well as e-learning.
The SOLO Taxonomy ( Biggs & Collis, 1982) provides a measure of understanding of thinking, it can be used effectively across all learning areas in a differentiated learning programme and it empowers students to assess their learning and determine their next steps in the learning process.

Using this model, I will follow the steps of:
* establishing a shared definition of what learning is
* share with the students the SOLO symbols and how these relate to levels of understanding and thinking

* develop student self-assessment rubrics with the students - relating learning outcomes to the SOLO symbols of understanding and thinking
* implement the use of HOT maps or suitable alternatives to guide and develop thinking processes
* implement ICT and Thinking interventions to enhance the learning process



The first challenge in helping students become lifelong learners is establishing a common understanding about learning and the learning process.
This week as an important first step in helping the students to understand themselves as learners, the goal is to establish a shared understanding of what learning is.
I asked the students to answer the following questions:
*What is learning?
*How do you know you are learning?
*How do you know how well you are learning?
*How do you know what to do next with your learning?
When I thought about the first question, ‘What is learning?, I realised that this is quite a difficult question to answer. I think that learning certainly means different things to different people. As an educator, my philosophy of teaching and learning and the constructivist learning theory that I adopt influences my thinking on learning.

The student’s responses to this question were:

BP - Learning is something that anybody can do. When learn people they get more knowledge.

CK - Learning is when you are taught or teach yourself to do something. You can have a discussion about it or just talk to someone about it.

RI - Learning is something that teaches us ways to know different things.

AN - Learning is working and thinking. You learn while your working.

JB - Learning is when you learn new things and the teacher teaches you how to do it.

DP - I think learning is when you ... I am not sure.

BM - I think learning is when a person or a group of people work together or alone to work something out or learn each others opinions.

EF - Learning is being taught to do something that you don't know how to do. It teaches you right from wrong, maths, spelling, how to walk, how to watch a movie and and every thing else there is that you don't know.

CC - ''i don't really know to be quite honesed''

OB - Learning is were you learn something new. Every day you should learn at least 1 thing new.

EM - Learning is a way to know things.

BR - I think learning is something where you get lots of new ideas in your mind and use them.

The interesting thing to note is that there is a varied sense of what learning might be. What is common about these responses is that they do not offer much that is useful to the learners in my class as they try to understand the learning process, or what to do next with their learning. From these responses it is also clear to me that many of the students in my class have gone through the year with little of no understanding of what learning is and/or what it is to learn. I feel shocked about this. How could students in my class become life-long learners if they are not clear about what learning means.

From the responses to the questions my next steps are:
*Share with the group their responses to the question – ‘What is learning?’
*Discuss how they felt about answering this question
*Discuss what they feel learning should look like, feel like and sound like.
*Come to a common consensus of what learning is in our classroom and display this 'Learning is …’ for easy reference and clarity.

Other little hitches that I experiences during the week:
I tried to use the narration tool on powerpoint. I really had difficulty with this because even though I saved the recording for each slide only the last recording saved could be hear. I need to work out why this happened.
I also introduced the children to Wordl which is a web2.0 tool which is a free open source tool.
Wordle is a tool for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.
I gave the children five minutes to write down all the words that they thought were associated with learning. However, when they pushed the CREATE button, none of the word clouds materialised. In speaking with our IT department, the problem lies with the updating of software on the school laptops. I am looking into this because I think that the use of Wordl will be quite informative for showing comparisons of developdment of thinking and understanding.