How the SOLO Taxonomy liberates learning in every MNP lesson
A couple of years ago I conducted a poll on Twitter regarding Taxonomies. The analysis of that poll showed that 80% of staff knowingly used a taxonomy to help them with their teaching. 63% of the people who used a taxonomy used Bloom’s Taxonomy, 25% used SOLO, and 12% used something else (e.g. Depth of Knowledge). Why, I wondered, was Bloom’s so well entrenched in schools? What impact did Bloom’s have on learning? And why were 80% of teachers using a taxonomy at all?
Taxonomies are typically used to help select the questions to ask pupils so that they are given an appropriate level of challenge. These questions, when viewed through a Bloom’s lens, start off easy - “What do you know?” - then they increase through the stages of Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation.
Most teachers will be more familiar with this framework - named the cognitive domain - than the other two domains. And most teachers will recognise the pyramidal hierarchy without being aware that the original intention was for pupils to achieve mastery of the first step (Knowledge) before advancing to the next step, then the next, etc. And Bloom defined mastery as “90% of the class achieving 90% or more on a test at that level of the Taxonomy”.
Each category of the Taxonomy was split into sub-categories (with the exception of Application); again this is not known by a majority of teachers surveyed. This goes to describe one of the tensions in our education system: We have rushed to the application of Bloom’s without first Knowing and Comprehending what we should about Bloom’s. Advocates of Bloom’s have often failed to apply its “theory” to their own learning. The irony klaxon can just be heard over the sound of people facepalming.
This is not a Bloom’s problem (I’ll get to the problems with Bloom’s shortly) but a teacher-impatience problem. And we are very good at repeating this type of mistake. We rush to the Abstract far too often because our education system has privileged the Abstract as the be-all-and-end-all; how much you know is typically more valued than how well you now it.
And that means we sometimes fail to make sense of what we are trying to do before we implement it.
No doubt this is probably sounding familiar to you, especially if you look at how pupils who are not securing their learning before moving on often see their learning structures fall down at the first sign of trouble. Tony Gardiner says: “If you’re going to build a high structure, make sure you have solid and deep foundations”. Good advice advocated through the pedagogical approach of Maths - No Problem! And if you can see Bloom’s definition of Mastery in Gardiner’s statement then that’s no surprise. Likewise if you think about the “Small Steps” approach of Maths teaching you’ll see there is a Bloom’s flavour to it.
This would be a great place to leave the story if it was not for a slight issue. Or three.
Bloom’s Taxonomy has had considerable impact on learning. It was implemented, at great expense to the US economy ($1 billion per year), to reduce the attainment gap between the high and low income students in the US in the 1960s. Lyndon B Johnson declared a “War on poverty” and instructed teachers to use Bloom’s to ensure that they asked questions of pupils at varying levels of difficulty. Remembering that you were not expected to advance to the next level until you had mastered your current level, this ensured, quite nicely, that pupils fell into two groups: those who could access the higher levels of Bloom’s and those who couldn’t. After several years of use, Bloom’s had single-handedly created an even bigger gap between those low and high income pupils. So more states were mandated to use Bloom’s. This was achieved through the use of mandated tests. Given that LBJ was putting $1bn per year into schools to close the gap, he wanted to see how much bang he was getting for his buck and what better way to do this than through testing? The system assumed that asking questions at a certain level of the taxonomy would elicit an answer at that level. Well, that’s just not true. It’s a great way to limit someone in my opinion.
Unsurprisingly the gap grew even more.
Bloom’s (the most quoted but least read work in all of education) has managed to do the complete opposite of what it was intended to do.
And the issues don’t stop there.
Bloom’s Taxonomy isn’t even a Taxonomy, having not been subjected, at the time of being proposed, to a systematic review. Neither was it based on any learning theories that were around at the time. Bloom’s is an oversimplified framework rather than a model or a theory as it fails to predict phenomena regarding learning.
So what happens next?
If your intention is to focus on your teaching instead of your pupils’ learning then stick with Bloom’s; either the 1954 version or the 2001 revised version. However if you’re interested in the way of Maths - No Problem! then Bloom’s is not the best lens through which to view it.
The approach of MNP is typically described as:
- Present the pupils with a problem to solve (In Focus task)
- Ask the pupils to find multiple ways to solve the problem (Polya)
- Give them ample processing time (Piaget) through collaborative working (Vygotsky)
- Take part in sense-making of the pupils’ methods (Let’s Learn - Dienes and Skemp)
- Give the pupils opportunity to use their skills in smaller group work (Guided Work)
- Give the pupils individual opportunity to apply near and far transfer of their skills (Thorndike - Independent work)
- Allow the pupils time to reflect, through journalling, on their learning to further develop their meta-cognition (Dewey, Flavell)
To try and view this through a Bloom’s lens would be tricky given that the pupils wouldn’t advance to Synthesis or Evaluation until they had mastered all the lower stages of Bloom’s.
It is now time for the SOLO Taxonomy to appear. SOLO was developed as a Taxonomy in 1982 by John Biggs and Kevin Collis. SOLO (the Structure Of Learning Outcomes) looks at the range of responses and outcomes that learners produce and then checks to see if there is a common structure in all subject areas. And it appears that there is.
When asked to answer an open question we see the following structure appear:
- Some pupils are pre-structural (they don’t have a clue)
- Some pupils are uni-structural (they have some knowledge)
- Some pupils are multi-structural (they have even more knowledge)
- Some pupils are relational (they can connect their ideas together and compare this with that)
- And some pupils are at the extended-abstract stage (they can create a new idea)
There is not a hierarchy here but a series of stages. SOLO proposed that learning occurs in cycles rather than as a linear (small-step) process.
Learning is messy.
The first three stages of SOLO look at how much someone knows (Quantity). The final two stages look at how well someone knows it (Quality). In contrast with Bloom’s, SOLO suggests that all pupils can move to any part of the Taxonomy and that they may move from Quantity to Quality and back again. An expert teacher knows when pupils need to move between the two domains. Every MNP lesson ensures that pupils have the chance to play in the quantitative and qualitative phase.
Look back to the MNP lesson approach:
In-focus task asks pupils to move through the Quantity stages. Polya invites us to look at how many ways we can solve the problem. This is moving from pre to uni- to multi-structural. Where pupils arrive at the uni-structural they are asked to move toward the multi-structural.
Let’s Learn moves pupils toward the Relational stage. The greater the quantity of knowledge, the more complex the Relational stage may be. And this complexity is the breeding-ground of greater levels of learning. Here we are ensuring that the learning foundations are becoming better bonded together. Where pupils have not progressed to the multi-structural phase they are still given the opportunity to secure their uni-structural phase.
The move to the Extended Abstract looks at both the creation of new ideas as well as the familiar Concrete-Pictorial-Abstract (Bruner) approach. The quality of extended abstract is going to depend on the quantity of knowledge and the ability to be creative. By having mixed-ability groupings you will see some pupils who typically struggle to build knowledge show great ability in the connecting and extending aspects of the lesson; this opportunity would not be available to them in a lesson driven by Bloom’s-type teaching.
It is interesting to note that SOLO was being developed as a Taxonomy in 1982, which is around the time that Singapore were starting to consider how to improve their education system. Look at The Cockroft Report and it comes alive when viewed through a SOLO Taxonomy lens. The learning theories used to construct the MNP way of learning Maths were based on how pupils were deemed to learn, rather than looking at how the teacher teaches. As I often say: pupils learn when they learn, not just when we teach; our teaching increases the likelihood that our pupils will learn.
There is more knowledge to be built regarding SOLO Taxonomy for many people and a future blog of mine will attend to this. The SOLO Taxonomy is, I would conjecture, the learning operating system of pupils who are successfully engaging with MNP lessons. What the teacher does is not nearly as important as what the pupils do. And when the pupils reflect on their learning, not your teaching, an even greater amount of learning is able to be liberated.
Comments
Post a Comment