News

The IKEA effect and teacher inquiry

November 7, 2013

This week I have been developing a series of twenty six SOLO rubrics for exploring the Professional Standards for Primary Principals in New Zealand – rubrics for professional competencies around Culture, Pedagogy, Systems and Partnerships and Networks. I am quite pleased with the first draft thinking. I especially like how I have been able to […]

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Essential Resources SOLO Flyer

November 2, 2013

Just reflecting on the response to the SOLO Flyer tweet below. DM messages have been pinging in from across the world. I started building an active community to support classroom based approaches to SOLO Taxonomy in New Zealand over ten years ago – spreading it to other places has been made a lot easier through […]

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Advice to little girls and avoiding the ‘Blue Book’

October 28, 2013

Good little girls ought not to make mouths at their teachers for every trifling offense. This retaliation should only be resorted to under peculiarly aggravated circumstances. Advice to Little Girls – Mark Twain Mark Twain’s 1865 children’s book offers some wonderful advice to little girls. I first read about the book on Maria Popova’s blog […]

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Learning as an ongoing artwork

October 26, 2013

It is the beginning of a “long weekend” in Auckland – I am lost in Hans Ulrich Obrist’s “do it” – a breath-taking and thought provoking compendium of “instructions for others to make into works of art”. You can read Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings post about the compendium here. I was thinking about writing instructions […]

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Drive-through generosity, pay it forward and SOLO Taxonomy.

October 23, 2013

One of the things I enjoy about the day job is the opportunity to work with different teachers in many different learning places and spaces across New Zealand. I am always turning up someplace new, working with teachers on classroom based approaches to SOLO Taxonomy and then leaving again. It is not unlike the process […]

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Now offering BIG and small versions.

October 21, 2013

Update to HookED SOLO Hexagons app – now offering “BIG” and “small” version templates

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Five powerful questions

October 20, 2013

One of the things I love about the classroom based use of SOLO Taxonomy is the way in which using the model helps students understand great questions. SOLO helps students understand how to construct great questions and how to answer them. For example, the HookED SOLO Five – a series of five great questions students […]

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SOLO Rubrics in Te Reo Māori, Français and 日本語

October 19, 2013

Pretty excited to be working on a new SOLO project with native language speakers, academics and New Zealand secondary teachers from Lincoln High School (New Zealand) to re-purpose the SOLO Functioning and Declarative Knowledge Rubric Generator apps in Te Reo Māori, Français and 日本語. [Other languages in my teetering stack of “what next projects” include […]

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I was only five and armed with an “egg” and a spoon.

September 27, 2013

It can be hard to remember your first learning experiences. At five I remember determinedly studying the points of difference between “was” and “saw” on small pieces of card when I was learning to read. I remember my teacher climbing onto the piano to staple a poster to the wall (and instead staple her fingers […]

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Revisiting analogy.

August 11, 2013

Modelling the process of making an analogy is an on-going challenge for educators. In my previous consultancy I developed a visual process map and self-assessment rubric to help students unpack existing analogies or create their own. It worked in part but I was never terribly happy with it. Oftentimes the output of the activity seemed […]

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