Two Key Tips for Teachers who Exhibit Student Learning

RON BERGER:I think it’s always best to think about any of these practices as to how they would hit someone who’s new and look at the hardest case scenario of somebody who has no experience with this. How do we expose it to them in a way that they can build on it through the years? And I think having strong exhibitions of student work is a skill that takes time to develop and the first year you do it, it’s not going to be as strong. And you’ll build a craft of how to do that better over the years hopefully with mentorships and collaboration on your team. Hopefully you have a lot of models in your building and a lot of support. I don’t think it’s best to try to do it all in your own. I really do think people that are more experienced and it can give you a lot of help coaches can give you a lot of help in doing it. The two things I would say to a new teacher doing her first exhibition of student work is it’s going to take three times as long as you think it will to get kids ready for it. We can almost never overestimate the time that it’s going to take for you and the kids to really be ready to do a quality exhibition and I think the first time teachers do it they don’t allow enough time for that to happen and they’re too worried about taking time away from other lessons to get ready for it and they end up suffering because the exhibition itself is not up to what they would all hoping for. The longer you teach in that style the more you think I’m giving myself a lot of time to do this really well so we’re really proud of it. The other piece of advice I would give is that too often the exhibitions focus on what kids have done versus on what they learned and so if it’s only focused on what they’re what they’ve done then the only thing we’re looking at is the craftsmanship aspect of how good is your poster how good is your model how strong is this that you’ve shown us and kids just show you what they did. It’s equally important that an at an exhibition kids are able to meta cognitively articulate this is what I learned from doing this and let me show you where I started in my thinking and let me show you like I understand the concept of this now and you can see that in my work. Or I didn’t really get how to do this I didn’t understand scale and I didn’t understand proportion when we first started this drafting project and so you’ll see from my early drawings here that I had the whole concept actually didn’t work for me and here’s the draft where it started to work it doesn’t look that great but this is where you can see that things are actually in proportion and there to scale but it is not that well drafted and here’s my final and it’s not as good as Randy it’s like it’s not super beautiful yet but I’m pretty proud right now because I actually understand scale and I understand Drafting and I know how to use the equipment right right now. So that’s a very different from here’s my final draft and it this is what I did this is like this is what I learned these are the skills and concept I learned through the process. And so an exhibition of student learning is an exhibition of their learning not just the products of their learning and quite often teachers and kids focus only on can you tell visitors to your exhibition what you did rather than what was your learning process what are the concepts and what are the skills that you learn through what what did you go through. And the strongest exhibitions I’ve been to are ones where I’m most taken by what kids can reflect on about their work as they’re sharing not just that the work is beautiful but that their ability to reflect on the work and how they change over the course of the work is also what excites me.