I often describe learning with SOLO as like licking an infinitely tall ice cream cone – the gradual and cumulative process of removing melting ice cream dribbles continues around and around and around the cone.
In a similar way learning with SOLO never stops – when you reach extended abstract for one content or context you simply zoom out to another level and start again – lifelong learning.
John Biggs refers to a qualitative model of student learning as like climbing a spiral staircase (refer Biggs 1994)
I know I talk about this often with client schools, and have written about it in the SOLO Taxonomy in Mathematics book and First Steps with SOLO Taxonomy book but the ongoing and spiral nature of SOLO is often neglected in the way we represent SOLO using oral language, visual language and text.
I suspect this is in part because teachers fail to grasp the adaptability of the model – that with SOLO task and outcome can be at different levels of SOLO – but perhaps it simply reflects how hard it is to create good 3-D representations of a student’s progress through a spiral graphic.
As a consequence teachers and students who are new to using SOLO in the classroom can represent the extended abstract level as an end point rather than an opportunity to think again – to repeat the process accumulating deeper and deeper understanding.
I was pleased to have the opportunity to re-affirm the spiral nature of the model in a recent piece I wrote for the Best of the Best series – a promising new educational book series about the ideas that matter most – planned by Crown House Publishing, Isabella Wallace, Leah Kirkman and Osiris Educational. As you might guess my piece focused on “Progress” and captured the importance of the classroom based use of SOLO Taxonomy in making student’s next steps visible.
Finally, there is no race to the top with SOLO. Instead, progress is represented by a metaphoric spiral: over time, learners accumulate deeper understanding as they continually revisit the SOLO levels, reinterpreting new ideas and integrating them with what they already know. SOLO is a model that assumes progress is ongoing; it assumes we will never stop learning. Hook (in Press)
Reference: Student Learning Research and Theory – where do we currently stand? John Biggs, University of Hong Kong In Gibbs, G. (ed.) Improving Student Learning – Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff Development (1994)
