Timothy Ong TRB t2 Week5
Timothy Ong TRB t2 Week5
Timothy Ong TRB t2 Week5
Reflective questions, Reactions As you look at the students’ works, what concerns/pleases you?
How did you feel as you were . . . ?
R As you reflect on the lessons, what was exciting, surprising, or frustrating about . . . ?
What about the “What”? Which activities/actions do you think fostered high engagement?
Reflective
Interpretive questions, critical thinking: What could you have done/could you do to increase . . .?
What could you have done/could you do to minimize the undesirable . . . .?
I What other ways could you check for students understanding?
So What? What did you learn about yourself through this experience?
Interpretive
Meeting Oral Communication Demands with 406 – Collaborative Charts for Idea Generation and
Substantiation
This week’s reflection incorporates tenets of Biggs and Collins (1982) SOLO Taxonomy in relation to a
‘Collaborative Perspective Chart’ activity that Adeline and I conducted in 406. In the lead-up to the ‘O’ level
Oral examinations, we hoped to guide our graduating students in terms of making cognitive connections
among themes / topics / viewpoints and to be able to take multiple perspectives on real-word issues and
trends. Through a series of lessons, we were able to sharpen their criticality when approaching the ‘global’
question usually asked as ‘Prompt 3’ in the Spoken Interaction portion of the Oral Examination.
As students shared their points, Adeline and I modelled the development of our content pointers and
elicited responses from our students to compare and contrast the qualities of our verbal responses. This
very much ties in with SOLO 4 ‘Relational Level’ where students were increasingly able to gain a deeper
understanding of how different themes and substantiations cohere and form together as a whole.
As we went through content generation through joint construction, we found that gradually, students were
becoming more competent in terms of relating domains and associated ideas as well as provide more well-
rounded analyses pertaining to various themes.
One feature that stood out was the necessity of various linguistic and discourse structures which seemed to
help scaffold their thinking processes. With more practice and as students’ cleave off instantiations of
teacher modelling, I am persuaded that we can certainly work towards SOLO 5, that of the Extended
Abstract level wherein students would be able to generalise beyond the question stimulus provided.
Transference of ideas to newer areas would be the next aim to work towards as students at this stage would
demonstrate adept finesse in theorising and even criticising notions and standpoints.
Date: _______________________