Ron Berger:
It was inspiring because kids were passionate about showing evidence that they were good at things, like kids own their work.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Ron Berger. In this episode, Ron is talking about presentations of learning. Ron is the senior advisor on teaching and learning at EL Education. He’s the author and co-author of several indispensable books on education, and he was an elementary school teacher for 28 years, from 1975 to 2003. That’s all I’m going to say up top because I really want you to hear this episode.
What is a presentation of learning?

Ron Berger:
We should probably narrow that down. There’s so many different ways that students share their learning with a broader audience beyond their own fellow students in their class, and some of those are through student-led conferences, where the students lead their own family conference. We discussed that before. Some of it is through large celebrations of learning that a whole grade level will do, or a whole part of a school will do, or a class will do for the community, might be held at the school, it might be held out in the community. Sometimes it’s through a project in which kids are presenting formally for a civic body, presenting at the library, presenting at the town hall, presenting at a civic event. Sometimes it’s through kids presenting their work out in public through exhibits that they’ve created that are installations in public spaces, so there are so many ways.

But I’m assuming that when we’re talking about presentations of learning, we’re talking about when students formally present, individually present, a compendium of their work in multiple areas, meaning academic subjects and often aspects of their character and arts and other life, to an audience that’s often school people and community people. So that is called a presentation of learning in many schools, and in the EL network we call that a passage presentation. And then other places have different words for it, and I think the original word for it came from Ted Sizer, whom I was so fortunate to get to work with, and he called them exhibitions of mastery. So it goes by many names, but it’s students presenting evidence of what they know and can do.

Alec Patton:
And how did you first encounter them?

Ron Berger:
I first encountered them theoretically through the work of Ted Sizer. Some of you who are listening know Ted, who was a seminal leader in education. He had a book called Horace’s Compromise that came out in maybe ’84, where he talked about redesigning American high schools, so that what kids were learning was actually going to be useful for their lives, so that kids would be really engaged all day long at school and would have some agency and power to make decisions and have real authority to do things in their learning that would have a connection to their community.

And in that book he talked about the idea of graduation by exhibition, is how he called it, that kids, rather than just graduating because they had enough seat time, because they sat through classes and got a decent enough grade in all their classes that they could then get a certificate of graduation, what if they had to do a formal exhibition to show what they know and can do in different subjects, in mathematics and literacy, in history, in science and arts, and evidence of the accomplishments they’ve done in life and as a human being.

And so those exhibitions were where, I first read about them in that, and then fortunately I was able to go down to Central Park East in Harlem, where Debbie Meyer had founded Central Park East Elementary, and then Central Park East High School, where students graduated through exhibition. I was able to see students do their exhibitions of mastery of learning for the community, and I was inspired by it. So I brought that back to my own school in the early 80s, and it’s still going on 40 years later in the school where I taught for more than 25 years.

Alec Patton:
What was it about that at Central Park East that was inspiring?

Ron Berger:
Boy, it was truly inspiring for me, not just theoretically in the work of Ted and Debbie Meyer, and other great thinkers at the time, all of whom I borrowed all of my ideas, but it was inspiring because kids were passionate about showing evidence that they were good at things. Kids own their work, they own the accomplishments they made, it really ramped up the investment of kids and engagement in their work because there was a reason they were getting ready with everything, which was to share with people that they cared about.

Perhaps a good metaphor is when kids are in a church choir and they’re getting ready for a performance, or when they’re in the cast of a play and they’re getting ready for a performance, or when they’re in a debate club or a model UN and they’re going to go up in front of an audience to compete, or when they’re in a sports field of any sport at all and they’re going to be performing, they’re presenting their understanding and their skills in front of people they admire and people they love, their family members, their friends, the people from their community. The engagement is deep because they want to succeed, they want to shine in front of people they admire, and that same power can be brought to academics through presentations of learning.

Alec Patton:
This may be an odd way to phrase this question, but if I’m thinking about traditional school, what does a presentation of learning replace?

Ron Berger:
Huh, I wouldn’t even think of it that way, Alec, it’s an interesting question. I don’t think it’s replacing something. I mean, I guess it’s replacing the requirements for are you ready to move on from middle school to high school, or elementary to middle school, or replacing, are you ready to graduate, in a way. But I wouldn’t even call it replacing, I would say it’s taking the power of public audience that kids already have when they publish the school newspaper, when they perform on their athletic teams, when they perform in the school play, and it’s taking the power of that and connecting it to all of their academic and artistic and character growth, so that every kid has to present evidence to their community that they are doing great work and ready to move on to the next phase of their life.

So I think it’s an addition, not a replacement, and I think that it is an engine to push kids and teachers to make more meaningful and relevant work, because when students start presenting their work it becomes quickly evident which work is deep and important and challenging, and which work is not so meaningful. And so it pushes teachers to deepen the quality of what they’re giving to kids for content and responsibility, and it makes kids feel like they should be working harder to produce things they’re proud of.

Alec Patton:
What happens if a second-grader is giving their presentation of learning, and the people who are listening to it and watching it determine that that student has not fulfilled the requirements of second grade to go on to third grade?

Ron Berger:
Yeah, so you’re raising many questions in that one question, Alec. First of all, there’s many different structures of presentations of learning. Some schools do them every year at the close of the year. In the EL education model we call them passage presentations, and we only do them when kids are passing from one school to another, or one part of a school to another. So when kids are leaving elementary and going on to middle school, they do a formal passage presentation as a rite of passage, just like a confirmation, a bar mitzvah, a quinceanera, it’s a passage in your life, like a wedding. You’re presenting yourself at a point of inflection in your life to the people you admire and love.

And so for EL that happens between elementary and middle, middle and high school, it happens at the end of high school, and we, not totally arbitrarily, but strategically placed another one between 10th and 11th grade, because we found that that was the year where kids tended to begin to back away if they didn’t feel like they had the potential to get into colleges or another great post-secondary opportunity, and we wanted them to double down at that point and be ready to enter two years of intensity about getting ready for a good post-secondary choice. So we added a passage between 10th and 11th, but otherwise they’re inflection points or transition points in a kid’s life, which is why we call them passage presentations.

And the degree of accountability and high stakes really depends on the age level and the school and the setting. So in many schools, presentations of learning happen and they’re not a binary you pass or don’t pass. The kids get just qualitative feedback from community members about what they admired about the work and little pushes about where they could invest their time even more. So in many places it’s not a yes you pass, or no you don’t pass. And certainly with second-graders, we wouldn’t have the community make an arbitrary decision like that.

There are schools, especially high schools, where they are high stakes, schools that I’ve worked with or have been able to visit, and in those cases students do actually have to pass in order to move on. In the video that we’ve created at EL of high school passage presentations, we open the video with a student at a high school for the arts who does not pass hers on her first try. And it’s a beautiful presentation, but then you see her meeting with her teacher and the community member afterward and they say, “You did a great job, but you didn’t pass yet, your senior expedition is not quite ready. And so we’re going to give you a month to work on it, we’ll give you support, and we’re going to have you re-present on this date,” and then in the video you learn that she eventually redid it and was able to pass.

So one of the great things we’ve learned is that if it’s high stakes you can’t make it at the very end of the year because you need kids to have a second chance to study and practice and try again until they do pass.

Alec Patton:
Going back to when you were a teacher, what was your grade, remind me?

Ron Berger:
I taught all elementary and middle grades at some point, but most of my time in 28 years was spent with fifth and sixth grade students.

Alec Patton:
Okay, so when you had a fifth or a sixth grade student, which in fact puts you in passage presentation area, were you doing presentations with them?

Ron Berger:
So I instituted what we called, at that time, portfolio presentations, another name for this same structure. I instituted portfolio presentations in 1984 based on what I had learned from Debbie Meyer in Central Park East, and Ted Sizer, and every sixth grader had to present their learning to a community panel. Their parents and friends and family members could be in the audience, but the panel was members of the school board, and teachers from other schools, representatives from the junior high school, and then later the middle school that they were going to attend, the regional one, and educators from other parts of the country even would come in and be on our panel, and the students would present formal evidence of their skills and understandings and progress in all academic areas, and also arts and athletics, and also their own character growth and their skills outside of school. And then answer questions from the panel, and it became a true rite of passage in my small town.

I live and work in a small rural community, I still live there, and the tradition became so important in the community that I left the school 20 years ago, and those passage presentations are happening every year, still. There’s been more than a dozen principles during the last 40 years, but they are still doing them because the community loves going to see the students they know and love presenting the best of what they can share with the world.

Alec Patton:
That’s wonderful. And how did you decide who to invite to that panel that first year?

Ron Berger:
Well, different schools and districts use different models for who they want to have on the panel, just like there’s different models of accountability, and I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer on that. We live in a small town, and so we were able to lean on the school board, school committee members, to send a representative every year. We thought it was great if somebody from the school that they were going to, which was a regional junior high school, regional middle school, were present. Often the guidance counselor, or one of the key teachers in that school would come down, and so they got a look into students before they entered the big new building that they would be bused to far away. That meant a lot to students, to know there was somebody in the building they were going to enter who would be able to do it.

Kids could also request, “Could I have my minister, my priest, my dance teacher, my writing teacher, my soccer coach be on the panel?” And so we canvased the community and we often had more requests for being on the panel than we could fill every year, because people love, this is a very moving experience, to hear kids share the best of what they can do.

Alec Patton:
Are there other approaches that you want to share now that people might want to think about as far as people who would be on the panel?

Ron Berger:
Yeah, I mean, I can share lots of examples. The Eagle Rock School, which is a school in Estes Park, Colorado, is a last chance school for kids who have been kicked out of other schools for problems with truancy or violence or drugs or alcohol, or other issues. Often they’ve spent time in the criminal justice system, but they want to try again. And so they get a community sponsor and they get an all expense paid scholarship to go to the Eagle Rock School to take a new shot at life. And it’s a very moving place, it’s a powerful place of personal journey and transformation of students that have made bad choices but are ready to make better choices.

And those students continually present to the community as the audience evidence that they have changed who they are as a person and evidence that their academic work has made real progress, and those are stirring presentations. When I got to them, it’s like being in an AA meeting, there are no filters, kids are just bearing their hearts and souls about their journeys, and the community is pushing them if they think they’re not being honest enough, and giving them a lot of love when they see the growth they’ve made. And so the high stakes there are really that the panel is actually the community itself accepting you, celebrating you, and pushing you for what you’re sharing about your personal growth and your academic growth. I will share a model of how do you scale this at a larger scale?

I worked with a middle school where they thought we need to have a system for passage presentations that we can create a lot of panels that can simultaneously meet so we can get all of our eighth grade students through in one day so that we can have one big day of passage presentations before they all go to high school. And so they got parents and business people from the community, and they got teachers, and every panel had three members. So each student presented to a teacher from the high school, a community member, and it could be a parent, could be a business person, it could be someone on the school board, and the third person was a high school senior. And so the seniors got released from class in order to sit in and be a panelist, and the seniors loved it.
And the eighth graders were so impressed to have a senior on their panel that we quickly realized that the eighth graders cared more about how, the high school senior, was viewing their presentation than the other two adults. That was absolutely clear that they really wanted to impress that high school kid with what they could share. And then the family members were in the audience. And I spent an entire day being a part of a three person panel throughout the day, in the library, in the hallways, in classrooms, in the technology room, all day long kids were presenting their work, and it was just powerful and really moving.

Alec Patton:
So one thing that I think is tied up in this, but maybe invisible, if you haven’t already done it, is that these may happen at the end of your time at a school, but the documentation you’re going to need in order to give one of these presentations is going to start when you first arrive at that school. So in an elementary school, what do you need to start doing in kindergarten to make sure that that fifth grade kid is able to share at the end of their time at that school?

Ron Berger:
It’s an excellent question. The reason that when we initiated this structure at my school in Shutesbury, Massachusetts, the small rural school, we originally called them portfolio presentations. In fact, that’s what they’re still called at that school, because students had to keep portfolios of their work, their academic work and their artistic work and their out of school work, all year long. And they were big, fat portfolios, and then they had oversized portfolios for oversized work, and those portfolios were kept for years and years. Kids could bring them home, but save them, and so when they needed to do a cumulative presentation of learning, a cumulative passage presentation, they had their portfolios to draw on and they could pull out actual work. They could say, “This is where I was as a first-grader, this is what I was struggling with, I want to show you my progress in mathematics or in literacy over the years.”

And so I think it’s so powerful to have kids keep and maintain portfolios of their progress of the work that they do, and they can see their own growth and reflect on their own growth.

Alec Patton:
So now I imagine almost any student, and you’d probably hope it would be the case, their work is going to be a mix of hard copy and digital.

Ron Berger:
Exactly.

Alec Patton:
What are you seeing now schools doing in order to help kids have a hybrid portfolio?

Ron Berger:
Yeah, I think a hybrid portfolio makes a lot of sense. Now most schools can have their students presenting their work on a smart board, having a laptop connected to it or a tablet connected to it, and students can show an audience examples of their work through everything being a digital portfolio. Although I do think it’s really powerful to have original work as well. It’s great for the audience to be handed essays, reports, reviews, poetry that students have written themselves and have it in their hands and have time to look at it and review it as they’re thinking, as they’re asking questions.

So I think the combination is powerful. I think rather than just have students show a photograph of a painting they made, to have the painting actually there. Rather than show a digital copy where they’re talking about, with PowerPoint slides, about a scientific study they did, if people are holding that scientific study in their hands during the presentation, they can ask specific questions about what they see in it. So I think a combination of hard copies, actual artifacts of their learning, and digital work is really the way to go, and it’s what I see most of the time now.

I would also push that I think it’s really important that students bring artifacts of their learning outside of school. Very often the learning that students are most proud of is learning that doesn’t happen within the walls of the school, but learning that they should get credit for because they have powerful skills and capabilities. So my sixth grade students would share the work they did caring for animals on their farm, the work they did cutting down trees. A student brought a chainsaw to one of his portfolio presentations and disassembled and reassembled the chainsaw in front of the panel to show how capable he was as a woodsman.

Students brought in dance tapes to show how they were working on dance out of school, they brought in videos of themselves in horseback riding contests. They brought in animals that they had reared themselves. They brought in all kinds of things to show the skills that they have in the real world beyond the school, because those things matter too, sometimes more than anything kids are learning in school. They are deeply proud of the church choir they’re in, the 4-H Club they’re in, the community organizing group they’re with, the work they’re doing in sports. Kids should be able to share that work also and take pride in it, as well as the traditional academics that they see in school.

Alec Patton:
And what role does the teacher play in the presentation?

Ron Berger:
Well, the teacher is not the audience for the presentation, the teacher is the coach of the team, the director of the play. The teacher’s job is to make sure they get every student ready to shine and speak cogently and deeply and honestly about what they’re learning, and where their growth areas, are and what they can reflect on about the stages they’ve been through, where their next steps are, what their goals are. It’s not intuitive for every kid to be able to speak thoughtfully and reflectively in front of an audience about who they are as a person, what they’re learning in each of the areas of their learning, and what their next steps are. That has to be coached and rehearsed with peers, and the teacher needs to set up the situation for kids to prepare.
So I think of the teacher’s role as teachers getting ready for a play, really. Teachers are helping kids organize their portfolios, helping them think and reflect, giving them organizers where they can not just speak about a piece, but speak about what they learn from that piece, what skills, what content did they learn from doing that piece? And practicing with kids and role playing with kids. And so the teacher is the coordinator of the event to make sure that every one of their kids succeeds.

And that’s the push, I was dedicated to it, and I couldn’t do it all myself. I would have parent volunteers who would come in and rehearse with kids before the presentations would happen, and parents loved coming in and rehearsing kids that weren’t their own child. They loved being able to just step up and say, “No, you’ve got to put your shoulders back, more eye contact, slow down, I didn’t understand that,” they just felt like I’m getting to love all the kids in this class, because they came in as just coaches for presentation. And in a way, presentations of learning are readiness for life, they’re getting you ready for college interviews, for job interviews, for presentations at your job. So the skills that we can imbue in kids and coach kids are lifelong skills about how do you present yourself clearly and honestly?

Alec Patton:
Some teachers listening to this, who are doing this for the first time, will be thinking, I love this, I’m excited about it, I did not train to be a debate coach, I did not train to be a theater director. What advice do you have for somebody for whom helping kids prepare for these kinds of presentations just feels really alien to them?

Ron Berger:
Well, there are many models out in the world, at places like High Tech High, where you work, Alec, there’s beautiful models of presentations of learning at many of the school networks. In addition to EL education, Envision Learning, and New Tech Network, so many different school networks have put out videos and documents that can give you guidance. At EL we have a book called Leaders of Their Own Learning, which has an entire chapter on passage presentations, with guidance about that. So you don’t have to start afresh, there’s lots of starters out there in the world, lots of videos of how these things look, lots of documents that you can use to start.

For example, in the book Leaders of Their Own Learning we have a section on passage presentations, or presentations of learning, and we share the kind of sentence starters that are really helpful for teachers. Because kids often, if they’re sharing a scientific study or a comparative literature essay they’ve written, they will often describe what the essay is about, or what the report is about. “This is a report about pollution in dirt in our city, we were looking for elements of lead and asbestos in dirt and in dust that we found in buildings, and so that’s what this report is about, and if you go to this page, you’ll learn this about it, and if you go to this part of it, you’ll learn this about it.”

We need to stop them and say, “What did you learn from creating this report? What are the skills of scientific investigation and research that you learned? What are the skills of software? Did you learn how to use a spreadsheet program? Did you learn how to use any technical equipment? Did you learn how to do laboratory protocols and experimental technique and scientific method? Did you learn how to do scientific writing?” And so instead of the student describing what you can already see, the student is describing his or her or their journey through what they learned, content and skills-wise, to create this piece.

Because that doesn’t come naturally to students, it’s really helpful to have sentence starters, one thing I learned from this piece is this, one thing that makes me proud about this piece is this. Before I did this work I didn’t know how to blank. The content I learned in this was this, new skills I learned from this was this. So those kind of sentence starters often help kids who don’t know how to start talking about the learning process of this, rather than just describing the thing itself.
So my main message is there’s a lot of different books and videos and tools out there around presentations of learning, and the Share Your Learning website that is convened by High Tech High Graduate School of Education, that whole Share Your Learning website is a compendium of resources around presentations of learning that people can get for free. The EL education website, all of our resources are free and open source in that same way. So I hope teachers won’t feel on their own, that they have to start from scratch, there’s lots of stuff you can borrow from the craft knowledge of other teachers.

Alec Patton:
Yeah, we’ll be putting links to all of those in the show notes.

Ron Berger:
Great.

Alec Patton:
Another dimension of this is I think some listeners, particularly with the El passage presentations, will be thinking there’s no way in a presentation that only happens once every few years, that the students at my school are going to have the confidence or the presentation skills to get up and do that out of nowhere. So what is it, especially with something that isn’t happening every year, isn’t happening every semester, what’s happening in the meantime to help kids develop those skills?

Ron Berger:
Well, if a school that is considering using presentations of learning already has a structure of student-led conferences, then the skills are already there and the experience is already there. Students who are used to presenting their learning to their parents, it’s an easy transition to think, okay, instead of just my parents, I’m going to be presenting them to community members as well, and instead of it being one semester’s worth of work I’m sharing, I’m going to be sharing a couple years worth of work. But the confidence and the ability to speak about what one is learning from one’s work, those things are already built in.

And so if a school is fortunate enough to already have a process of having student led family conferences, then passage presentations or presentations of learning is just another add that it fits right into the skillset that students already are developing in their work, and it’s a powerful addition, I think. If a school does not have any structure where kids are formally presenting their learning, then it does take building those skills and doing those rehearsals.

Let me share an example, Alec, of a school that took it on from scratch and they did not have student led family conferences. The school that I mentioned where there was a three person panel, one teacher from the high school, one high school senior, and one community member was on a panel for each eighth grader. Those eighth graders had not done this before and they were very nervous, and the teachers were nervous. And I met with one team of teachers from that school, and the science teacher was skeptical but willing to put in real time on the presentations for the science portion. The English and social studies teachers felt the same, and the English teacher was actually ready and willing to use some of her time in class to work on oral presentation skills and actually do the rehearsals with them.

The challenge was the mathematics teacher said, “I was not hired to be a drama coach, I’m not going to spend one minute of my time helping my students do this presentation because I’m going to be too busy getting my students to learn the math content. I don’t care whether they can present it in a flowery way, I just want my students to learn their mathematics.” And so how do you move ahead with one member of a four-person team who’s really not buying in? He was not dragged in, we just said, “Your students will present, you’ll be presenting mathematics as a part of that, and we can’t force you to do this. If you feel like you can’t spare that time, we will accept that, just make sure your students have their math work in a portfolio that they can bring to their English class when they’re rehearsing.”

So he was obstinate that year. He was a good mathematics teacher, I was not critical of him for that. But when he came and watched the students doing their presentations, the only work that they could not talk about with any depth and reflection was mathematics. In every other subjects kids had rehearsed, how do I talk about what I’ve learned in science this year? How do I talk about the concepts I’ve learned, the skills I’ve learned in science? How do I talk about scientific method and experimental technique? Kids spoke with depth and reflective power in every subject except mathematics, and when it came to mathematics they said, “Here’s my test in geometry, here’s my test in algebra, here’s my test in this, I have at 86 average.”

They couldn’t even answer questions from the panel about what were the more challenging things for you, if they said, “What was the more challenging?” They would just say, “Well, I got a lousy test score in this geometry test, so that must have been my weak point.” They hadn’t stopped to think about, what am I grappling with in mathematics? What do I actually struggle with? What am I proud of? And I will tell you that that mathematics teacher was embarrassed, and nobody made him embarrassed, nobody went out of their way to rub it in, he just saw that his students could not, and he assumed they could. He assumed that because he can talk metacognitively and reflectively about mathematics that his students could. But if they haven’t practiced, they couldn’t.
And so the next year when they did passage presentations, from the very first day of school he was changing the way he taught to have kids reflect and think about what are they understanding, what are they not understanding, and how do they speak about it? And the next year it was an entirely different thing. Without anyone saying to him he had to change it, he saw that presenting your thinking is a different skill, and presenting your thinking in mathematics is something that he had not focused on.

Alec Patton:
And this is somewhat connected to that, are there mistakes that you see teachers or administrators make with passage presentations or portfolio presentations that you want to tell people about right now so they can just skip over making those mistakes?

Ron Berger:
Well, we all make the same mistakes. We all make the mistake that we start too late to prepare kids, and then when the presentations of learning are happening we realize time is running out and we didn’t give it enough time. So you should figure out how long it’s going to take you for students to be ready and then double it, or triple it, because we always make that mistake with so many projects we do with kids, all of us, not all of us, but I’m in that category. So the first thing is time, is making sure you have enough time built in for kids to really rehearse and learn how to talk reflectively about their work, and not just what they did, but what they learned through doing it.

The second thing is that kids need support. They need sentence phrases, they need sentence starters, they need those phrases that help them pivot. What I learned most from this project was this, the skill I picked up while doing this was this, I’m proud of this piece because of this feature. When kids have those handles, then they have an easier time digging into their work, and without it, it’s hard. One thing that’s very clear to me is if students do not have props in their hand, then it’s much harder for them. And that sounds a little nuts, why does a prop make a difference? But when a student is holding up an essay she wrote, it’s easier for her to speak about it than if she’s standing there without it in her hands.

And so we’ve learned that it’s great for students to bring physical objects of their work so that they can point to them, hold them, show them on screen, point to things specifically, because the more abstract it is, the more students feel a little groundless in their presentations, and so having as many artifacts as you can there, like my student who brought a chainsaw, like my students who brought photographs of the kids they babysat, photographs of the place they worked after school, photographs of the animals that they raised, they brought in animals that they actually raised themselves, bringing in artifacts and things helps kids get away from that frozen moment when they get a little worried in front of a group. So those are just three pieces of advice, I would say.

Alec Patton:
On time, can you give a ballpark estimate of how much time teachers should be thinking of devoting to preparing for these?

Ron Berger:
Oh, I thought you were going to ask how long should they be?

Alec Patton:
That’s also a good question.

Ron Berger:
There’s a big range both in how long a passage or presentation or learning should be and how far ahead of time you should begin working with kids. So the passage presentations, or presentations of learning, I’ve seen range from 15 minutes to 45 minutes, and I would say the average is 20 to 30. But I think anywhere in 15 to 45 minutes is a very powerful experience for kids. And so if shorter works better for a school, and easier for kids to start, I think that’s fine too. 15 minutes is hard to fill if you’ve never done this before.

As to when to start, I will tell you that I started on the very first day of sixth grade. So kids came in in sixth grade and I would show them a portfolio presentation of a student that they knew from a previous year, presenting beautifully, and I’d say, “You’re going to be doing this at the end of the year.” And they would say, “No way, there is no way I can be that articulate and that powerful and that reflective and that eloquent, I could never have that composure, I’d be scared to death.” And I’d say, “That’s what we’re going to spend the whole year getting ready for. By the time you leave here, you’re going to do a presentation as beautiful as that.”

And then there would always be some kid who would say, “Yeah, but my older brother had you, there’s no way his looked like that.” And then the next day I would bring in a videotape of his older brother, and they’d be shocked. They were like, “Oh my God, your older brother is so polite and so clear and so composed, that’s not your older brother at all.” And they would ask hard questions, they’d say, “Well, what about this student?” And they would speak about a student who had cerebral palsy, whose speech was not really understandable by most people, only those who knew her well could understand her speech. And they’d say, “Yeah, but there’s no way that she presented.”

And then I’d say, “Would you like to see her portfolio presentation?” And they’d say, “Absolutely.” And I’d go to my files and I’d pull out a videotape of her presenting, and they saw her introduce herself and explain that her friend was going to have to voice most of her work because her speech was not fully understandable by most people. And then her friend would voice her work, she had written the script for her friend to voice this work, and kids were blown away. And they saw if a student who has cerebral palsy and has very limited motor control and speech control can still do an impressive presentation of learning, then there is no way that they have an out, there’s no way that they’re going to be getting a pass because they’re not good enough.
Every student for the last 40 years in my town has done this, no matter what their level of need, no matter what their profile of their background, every student has presented work that they’re proud of, and done it well. And so I would start on the first day of school and do it all year long. I do think at least two or three weeks out from presentations you need to start dedicating time for rehearsing and for getting ready, so that you think of it like a play in a way. Kids are getting their act together to do this well.

Alec Patton:
Is there anything else that I should be asking you that we haven’t covered that you want to bring up?

Ron Berger:
I think a presentation of learning goes best when it’s a real mix of work. And so where students share academic work and artistic work, and work that shows their character, and work that shows their out of school passions and interests and commitments, all of those built in make for the strongest presentation. And when they’re sharing their academic work, I think it’s useful for them to do a quick overview, “Here’s where I am with reading and writing, here’s where I am with science or mathematics. In a general way, here are the things I’m doing well in, here are the things I’m struggling with,” and then also to go in depth on a few pieces that are illustrative of the kind of work that they are learning about or learning from, or work that they’re really proud of.
So if you only focus on a few pieces of work that they’re proud of, the panel doesn’t get a sense of, but how are you doing in general in that subject? And if you only focus on how are you doing in general, “I have a 86 average in mathematics,” we don’t actually know what you’re grappling with and what your learning edge is. And so ideally you can say, “Here’s my general trend in mathematics this year, or in English this year, or over these two years, here are the things I’m working on, here’s where my strengths generally are, here’s where my weaknesses generally are, and then a paper that illustrates that really well is this paper, or a problem that really illustrates that well, or a project that really illustrates that well, or a test that really illustrates that well, let’s look at that together and you can see who I am as a learner from that.”
So I think the combination of overview explanations of where are you in history or in science, in whatever discipline, and then in depth looking at a few pieces of work, a few artifacts, a few projects, whatever the choices are, that can give you a deeper sense of who that child is, that’s a really good mix when it comes to academics.

Alec Patton:
Ron Berger, thank you so much, this has been just a joy and a pleasure to hear about all this.

Ron Berger:
Alec, it’s always an honor to be asked by you to do these.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. We’ve included lots of links in the show notes, so check those out. Thanks for listening.