Challenged!

Something that captured me today was an analogy Dorothy shared with us. An escalator is constantly moving. Many of our learners are experiencing a challenge with their learning which can be compared to having to run up the down escalator. If they stop moving forward, they will go backwards in their learning. Alongside this analogy, we also began to explore what it looks like to get our learners thinking critically, something I have already started to challenge my learners with in the classroom, particularly in reading.

Going up the escalator Chinese Shopping Mall Down by Ivan Walsh, licensed under CC by 2.0

My initial thoughts were that the combination of these two discussions create a massive challenge for us (the teachers) and our learners. We need to engage our learners so they are motivated to push themselves and therefore catch up to where is expected of them for their age. At the same time, we need to teach them the skills to be able think critically. We looked at these challenges alongside developing our google sites skills and talked about how we should make learning multi-modal for our learners (that is, putting learning into a range of different forms for our learners to access). We  each developed a google site page with a range of ways we could teach critical thinking through well known fairy tales. 

I can see SOLO taxonomy having the potential to help greatly with this because of the structured levels of thinking which build on each other, forming a visible goal for our learners. Therefore, after a discussion around SOLO taxonomy with my PLG, I have developed a challenge for myself where I want to begin weaving SOLO taxonomy into learning experiences for our learners.