Before I launch into a discussion of the CLP exhibitions institute, I want to sketch in the background of my experience with exhibitions in my high school.

The work of the last four or five years restructuring the school where I work has kept teachers and administrators diligently at it, and we have chipped away at things in a desire for reform and change. Without complete restructuring, we have been aware of and have worked with portfolios for some time; we work with curriculum embedded assessment; and are striving with performance assessments and exhibitions.

The members of the English Department at Santa Monica High School agreed to institute something called Senior Exhibitions. And since there was no agreement to standardize, it was decided that in the first year each twelfth grade English class would go its own way and evaluate it at the end. These exhibitions should probably rather be called performances to differentiate them from exit exhibitions that schools have instituted as graduation demonstrations on a school wide basis.

In this article, I will explain my own individual experience with the "new" senior exhibitions at Santa Monica High School and then tell about my experiences with the CLP Institute on Exhibitions.

In the 1993-94 school year I taught two senior classes, one was a small Advanced Placement Literature and Composition class and one was a class called Writers’ Workshop that was untracked. Our school year had been lengthened because of some construction and did not let out until June 30th. I tell this because the AP English test is given in early May and a number of seniors seem to think that it is all over at the time of the test. That is both a challenge and an opportunity for the senior exhibition program, for it leaves half of May and the whole month of June to teach seniors in high school after they have taken the Advanced Placement examination.

An exhibition differs from an ordinary research paper in that the student must both write and keep a bibliography on a subject, but must also present the findings in an oral presentation. It may also, as many modern research papers do, involve the use of different kinds of media: videotape, audio tape, overhead projectors, vcr’s, and computers. But I wanted it to be something with a larger difference. I called the written portion with the bibliography a portfolio, and I outlined how the oral presentation would work right from the beginning. We also kept journals and made progress reports twice a week. I really pushed them with the one overriding idea. Find, I kept urging, something you are interested in. Don’t think in terms of a school project or a "good" topic; make it something you are interested in. I provided models of my own reading; I lectured about what students should know after twelve years of school, and I took them to our library and showed them how to work the CD ROM resources we have. I virtually led them around to the shelves and put books into their hands.

One result of all this pushing was that quite few of them changed their topics almost weekly. They would find that their interest could not be sustained by most of the subjects they chose. I encouraged them to change and to keep looking. I held individual conferences with them every time we went into the library. One other result was that in some cases what they were really genuinely interested in were UFO’s and alien abductors.

There were a number of students who loved reading novels and took every opportunity to read when nothing else involved them. I told them to go ahead and read widely, read anything they wanted to read. And when the time came for presentations, they could write about and talk about Reading as a subject. All who were concerned in this area and chose Reading as a topic were overjoyed. Many of them remarked that it made the last two months of their senior year much more enjoyable because reading relieved the stress they were under. Their presentations were among my favorites because their enthusiasm for reading was felt by everyone in the room.

One of the ambitious ideas we had talked about for exhibitions is that the presentations would be given to a panel of people: classmates, teachers, adults from the community, and this panel would judge each of the students’ exhibitions. Good idea ! Bad year for it. It didn’t work. But I did manage to videotape each of the presentations. I also used that well-known and practiced pedagogical technique of threatening their final grade if they didn’t attend class dutifully for those last two weeks of school to listen to and critique each of their fellow classmates’ exhibitions.

After it was all over, as a final essay I asked the classes to write about which ones they remembered the most and what they liked about them, and then they wrote a letter to next year’s seniors, giving them advice about how to approach their senior exhibitions. The responses weren’t as predictable as I thought. Many of them were genuinely interested in and surprised by the topics of their classmates. And for advice to next year’s seniors they said get started early and don’t procrastinate, but they also said be sure to find something you are interested in and you will enjoy doing it.

One side note about the oral presentations. They were not universally thrilling. But one conclusion that I have come to from talking to other teachers of seniors is that we are not preparing our graduates to speak in front of people as well as we should. Therefore if we can, we are going to persuade all grade levels and other subject areas to pay more attention to this problem so that our graduates are more at ease speaking and organizing their speech. Thus, the exhibition has an effect on the curriculum as assessment should.

One other observation based on the oral reports is that the slang and "coolspeak" among students is so pervasive and so appalling that I am like, you know, going to like go on a crusade to at least get students to talk for ten minutes a year totally without like, you know, getting lost in the labyrinth of like that kind of talk, you know what I’m sayin’ ? And if I succeed, all the parents will be like, wow, y’know ?

I next turned to the Coalition of Essential Schools’ (CES) information on exhibitions for a procedure, and I adapted their questions to my problem.

• What will a graduate of this course look like ?

Here are the oral presentation requirements.

Reflection: The last question in the CES method is reflection: what problems occurred, what were the strengths and what were the weaknesses? In answer to these questions I would say the weaknesses were: first, we teachers cooperated but we did not collaborate. As a result the performances were spotty across the student body, the standards were variable, students felt that there was a disparity from one class to another, and some teachers did not participate.

The strengths were: we tried something new; we tried something as a department; some quite original ideas were promoted as a result of the projects. In talking to other teachers, I discovered that we all had some interesting feedback. In my case the students told me that they were fascinated by some of the things the other students were interested in. In a couple of cases the student presenters were so persuasive that students in the audience became interested in pursuing their topics.

Another teacher had students pursue an idea called "L.A. Lit." or Los Angeles writers. He left the choice of writers wide open and provided a list of writers and poets, but the students had to sift through all the writers to find one they liked. The students were not universally thrilled with L.A. writers. When the teacher asked them if he should have made the list more restrictive so that they would not have encountered so many bad writers, the students said, no, resoundingly because for the first time in high school they were on their own to choose the literature instead of having it chosen for them. If that is a heady feeling for high school seniors, then we teachers should get a message about how we "choose" or force literature on our students. And we should perhaps ask ourselves if we are making lifetime readers of our students.

But my story doesn’t stop there. Under the auspices of California State Subject Matter projects, specifically the California Literature Project in association with the Center for Academic Interinstitutional Programs and the Graduate School of Education at UCLA, I was given the opportunity to run a special program on exhibitions for five weeks in the summer for elementary and secondary teachers

We started with ten and finished with seven participants–four bilingual elementary teachers, one middle school teacher, and two high school teachers (one as the leader).

The idea of the seminar was to have the teachers construct their own plans, carry them out mirroring the instructional practice of the exhibition, preparing a written portfolio and an oral presentation of their research. The teachers and the mentor would prepare the goals, establish the process, and write the standards by which they should be judged. This is the list we arrived at.

A. Individual appointments during the week of August 1- 5

B. Attendance at presentations week of August 8 - 12

7. One follow-up meeting on a Saturday morning in October.

Each participant had a highly individual project, but the group spent many hours discussing ideas that led up to their projects and commenting on each others plans. In fact, the first week from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM was all background. (See attachment )

We found that in the second week, we still had subjects to discuss and to come to some understanding about . On Monday of the second week, we went to hear Steve Krashen speak to the literature project on the acquisition of language. We were operating more like a seminar group now and our discussions were lively and informative for each other. Krashen enlivened our discussions considerably.

In the afternoon we went to the library and helped each other use the computer searches for books and journals–an afternoon well-spent. Participants remarked how good it felt to be doing work in the library again as they had not been back since they had graduated from college.

On Tuesday our topics were: "Developing Meaningful and Fair Assessments: How Do We Design Assessments Which Encourage the Best from All Students" And "Developing Teacher Capacity to Use Assessment to Improve Instruction." After this meeting, we decided to have a follow-up session during the school year because we also decided to attempt to spread the word among other teachers at our respective schools about what we have learned from our projects and seminar discussions. At the end of the day we also decided that we are a literature project and we should all bring in some poems tomorrow both for the various projects for children and for our own enlightenment.

On Wednesday we started with a discussion of poetry and worked our way into each participants project, offering advice and encouragement. We set up some articles to read for Thursday and adjourned to the University Research Library. When I left for home at 3:30 they were all still sitting at computers in the library. They had become addicted to the library.

I was able to help them use Orion the UCLA online information system and Melvyl article citations from 6,500 journals. Melvyl is hooked to printers and will give printouts of articles or citations. A couple of us also did an ERIC search for this first time.

On Thursday we discussed "Determining and Monitoring Consequences" an article from the California Assessment Collaborative on performance assessment. We looked at Alfie Kohn’s book Punished by Rewards and worked some of the ideas into projects. I then presented the idea of student self-assessment which was received enthusiastically, and we decided to put a form of self-assessment into each project.

On Friday morning I presented materials on the California Learning Record. These teachers were not familiar with the processes at all, and as we went through the forms, the handbook, and the examples that teachers of different ages of children have kept, the enthusiasm of the teachers mounted until we went through almost every page of the handbooks and every scrap of information I had. Three of the bilingual teachers have decided to band together and try to get more materials on it and to implement it at their schools. The afternoon was spent going over tentative plans for each project, and we decided to meet next week only individually by appointment.

Most of my work during the appointments of the third week was in helping participants to find information, using the libraries, and helping them to focus on a single idea that would pull all of their ideas and research together.

Sandra was having trouble finding the focus for her mixed-age primary program until we hit upon the idea of giving an exhibition for parents of students who might be placed in her mixed-age primary class at the school where she works. I assumed the role of a parent of two children, one of whom was in first grade and one of whom was in third grade, and I grilled her about what my children would get in her class. Her research had prepared her with a ready answer for all my questions. It worked to get her to focus on the answers to questions and objections, and now she is ready with overheads and information to be the lead-teacher in the parent information sessions in September. (See the attachment by Sandra Estrada.)

This was the way most of the appointments went and we decided that we needed another week for everybody to get ready. We set all oral presentations for Friday of the last week and invited the co-directors of the Literature Project to come and hear them.

Friday arrived and we spent the whole day until 4 PM, giving the presentations and discussing each others ideas.

Everyone learned from the experience. Even the teachers who dropped out realized that the project would take too heavy a commitment to bring it to a close. I realized that quite a bit of work can be accomplished working one-on-one with a teacher who is serious about a project. I’m also interested to note that my experience with working with high school students writing research papers paid off when working with adults. The problems are the same.

I would have liked to have more students . The discussions we had and the decisions we reached together were an excellent learning model for teachers, some of whom have been teaching a long time and some of whom are relative newcomers.

I feel confident that there are now at least six teachers in schools in Los Angeles who are deeply interested in performance assessment and curriculum development. Furthermore these teachers are bilingual teachers in schools like 99th Street School, Breed Street Elementary, Grape Street School, and Ninth Street School. If you look at the locations of these schools in Los Angeles, you will see that it is important for them to have such teachers there.

During our seminars we were in the same building with the regular California Literature Project teachers and at the end of the exhibitions program we were in close proximity to the teachers in the two-week "Straddling Two Cultures" institute. Over coffee and during lunches several teachers showed interest in the idea of having a class on exhibitions and performance assessments, asking if there would be one next summer. To which I answer you never know. The model is simple: two weeks of intense seminar discussion stimulating enough to prompt them to work independently for two more weeks of research and writing with personal encouragement along the way . It can also burn them out.

I have included as attachments our first week’s schedule, the documents we developed as a group, and two of the oral report sections of participants.