 Hi everybody and welcome to week eight of the Deeper Learning MOOC. This week we're focusing on curation, exhibition, and audience, things that are near and dear to all of us here at High Tech High, and we've put together a fantastic panel to discuss this issue, some people from High Tech and some from people outside of High Tech, and we're really excited that you're joining us. Just a couple of messages from the top, I wanted to remind everybody to keep at those Deeper Learning badges, I think it's a great way to share your work and it's a great way to kind of get a little bit of a reward for some of the work that you guys have been doing as students and part of this community. I also wanted to make the announcement that the Deeper Learning 2014 is coming to San Diego, that's on March 26th and 28th, and I do think that late registration is available for that, so there are a few slots that are going fast. If you don't have the ability to join us here in San Diego and our beautiful 85 degree weather, we will be streaming live events in the morning of each of those days, and there's more information to come on that on Thursday. Next week is a week of reflection, so there won't be a ton of content pushed out, but we'll really invite our Deeper Learning community to sit back and reflect on their practices and what they've been able to gain and what they've been able to contribute to our Deeper Learning community. On Monday we will have a participant's panel, we have people from four or five different countries that will be joining us, and Rob will be facilitating that, we're very looking forward to that, and on Thursday we'll have our last student panel, and that will be facilitated by a student, so we're really excited about that. So without further ado, I will pass it off to Rob Ridden, and he'll introduce our panel. Thank you. Thank you, Ryan, and welcome everyone. It's nice to be with you again, or with you for the first time, as the case may be. Just a reminder to everyone, this evening on exhibition, audience, and curation is part of our series on Deeper Learning, which is defined by the Hewlett Foundation as actually the elements, particularly by the Hewlett Foundation, are content mastery, critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, effective communication, self-directed learning, and academic mindsets. The last two of those self-directed learning and academic mindsets comprising what the Rakes Foundation refers to as agency. So we're going to try to stay grounded in deeper learning as we discuss exhibition, audience, and curation tonight. We're going to meet our panel now. I'm Rob Ridden. I'm the co-founder of High Tech High, and the president of the High Tech High Grad School of Education, where we devote a lot of thought to finding audiences for student work and to attending to the quality of presentation, both for our adult learners at the GSE and for students in our K-12 schools. Let's hear from Tom. Thanks, Rob. Hi. It's Tom Banderick. I'm with Getting Smart, an education advocacy firm. Great. And Sonia. Hello. I'm Sonia Ramirez. I am currently a ninth grade humanities teacher at High Tech High North County. I'm also a student of the High Tech High Graduate School of Education program and the school leadership program. Great. Thanks, Sonia. Jeff? I'm Jeff Robin. I work at High Tech High. I'm the art teacher, and I'm working on getting my kids doing good art. All right. I'm the best art teacher in the country. Thanks, Tom. Thanks, Jeff. And thanks, Tom. Laura. Hi. I'm Laura McBain. I'm the High Tech High Graduate School of Education, and I'm actually broadcasting from the Southwest by Southwest conference this evening, normally in San Diego, but I'm at this conference this week talking about technology, arts, and innovation and design. So it really goes in very well with our concept tonight. Thanks. And Laura, I understand you're having some new thoughts about curation as a result of being at that conference, which we'll get to a little later on. I want to go right to Jeff, and Jeff, I'd like you to talk with us a little bit about exhibitions of student work. Why are they important, and what do we need to think about when we're putting exhibitions together? Well, the reason that it's important to show student work is it makes it real. It gives the kids a feeling that what they're doing is going to be appreciated more than just taking a test. When you take a test, it disappears. When you write, even when you write a paper, it requires somebody to take the time to read it. When you have an exhibition, it could be a play, it could be a performance, it could be something on the wall, it could be even a website or a book. It's something that's real and that's out there. It makes you known. And it's like standing up in front of people and saying, hey, check out what I did. And they really, even the most cynical teenager, really does, or child, or high school, or elementary, love to see the reaction that other people have when they show their work that they've worked on and the process and just show off that, hey, this is something I did. So, it's... From the standpoint of the teacher, as you're developing a project with kids and so forth, I know you've written an article for Unboxed called Planning, Management, and Exhibition. Just a little bit about where Exhibition comes into the planning process. Well, you've got to... I mean, it's almost like when I think about what I want to do with my students, I almost see, oh, wow, look at that big blank wall. I wonder what I could put up there. Or look at the middle of the school, there's nothing hanging from the ceilings. And so this semester we're making mobiles about themes in art history. And so it's filling a space. It's much like they do it in art museums or art galleries. You make a site-specific work. And so it starts from when you start planning it. You think, I want to show my work in this place. People that put plays on must think, I want to have this in a theater when I put it on, so why shouldn't it be that way with schoolwork? Finding a place ahead of time and then designing the work to fit into that place will... Tell us about a couple of places where you've displayed, where your students have displayed their work. Well, around school we just had an exhibit where my students made paintings about melanoma and the new treatments and new tests for it. And their paintings went up in this laboratory, in a laboratory environment. And it helps people understand what this new process is. We've presented stuff all over Hightech High, even in the restrooms. We have jazz playing in the restrooms and dedicated urinals to different people. Ben Daley is one of our greatest, dedicational urinals. It's where... Putting work up, I mean, it's this element of surprise. It's an element of... It's an element of surprise, it's an element of balance, it's an element of symmetry that brings to somebody's everyday life. So when you walk down the hallways, if the school is filled with the work that the students did, that shows what they've been doing. It's an authentic way of seeing what's really going on in the school. And so that's one of the things that motivates us at Hightech High, that motivates me. Tom Van Der Rok of Getting Smart and Long Time Friend of Hightech High. Tom, you've been in schools all over the world. What do you see in those schools by way of exhibitions of student work and so forth? And what's your take on the importance of exhibition and presentation and so on? Well, I'll say first of all that Hightech High is not only a great STEM school, it's the best art school that I've visited anywhere in the world. And so I deeply appreciate Jeff's work. And he's not only creative, but he really pushes kids to do their very best. I think every kid that goes through Hightech High discovers, if they didn't know it already, that they're an artist in part because they encounter Jeff. So the school is worth visiting just for the art. So I want to make two comments about exhibitions. One is that I think the best schools find ways to combine interest and standards. The schools have a clear set of goals, some stuff they want kids to know and be able to do, but they also push kids to go deep in areas that they really care about. And it's how they combine interest and standards that I think are so compelling. And I really think this intersection of interest-based learning and standards-based learning is really going to be the most interesting intersection for another decade as we move into digital and competency-based. The second thing that I'll mention is I think great schools link exhibitions to progress, to matriculation, that kids aren't just marking time, that they really are expected to show what they know before they move to the next level. Hightech High has graded that. The expeditionary learning schools are great at that. We studied about 20 schools around the country. And in one way or another, projects matter to kids. One, because there's stuff that they're interested in, and two, because they really do, they're part of how a student progresses through that system. Yeah, so the exhibition is not simply something that we might see on the walls, but it's something that is part of the flow of the school. And it's part of the spine. It's sort of the spine. It's connected to how a student understands the purpose and rule set of that place. I mean, the great thing about Hightech High is that it's a great example of a school around an intellectual mission, and everything coheres around that mission. And so students understand that there's a set of goals there, and that their exhibitions are linked to those goals. And I think that's when they really work best. Yeah, I love your kind of linking of standards based with interest-based. And my sense at Hightech High and other similar places that I've been in is that when you see student work on the walls or you see performances of learning, what you're seeing over time is the internalization of standards, the evolution of internal standards as to what constitutes excellent work within the setting. And it's not so there's this mix of internal standards rise to meet and sometimes surpass what we know as external standards. Which is, this is great in the sense that 24 years ago when I first started teaching, the kids would say, why are we doing this? And now in this model of teaching, the kids know why we're doing this. And in that sense, it's fantastic. There's not that feeling that it's a total detachment. They get the standards and they get what they're doing and it has more meaning for them. Jeff, you said two things that over the years that have really, among others, that have really stayed with me. One was one evening, one morning when you came into a staff meeting, it was the weekend after, it was the morning after an exhibition of learning. And you said, I just walked past the dumpster and there were all these student projects in the dumpster. We don't want dumpster projects here. We have to create work of lasting value. And I think that was, it was a turning point in my thinking and I think it was for a lot of the people on the faculty and so forth. And then I'll get to the other thing later on as the moment arises. But I want to get over to Sonya. Sonya, you're teaching ninth grade in High Tech High in North County. And you're also a graduate student in our school leadership program, really focusing on exhibitions of learning and students sharing their work. So tell me a little bit about what you're looking at and what you're finding in that work. So this is my fourth year at North County. And even though I'm not an art teacher, I've always been curious and also amazed at the way in which all of our high tech schools kind of display student work in such a beautiful and professional way. And yet being part of North County, I wondered, I felt like we really could do better in terms of displaying student work, not just in quantity, but also the quality, making sure that all of the content areas are being represented. I also felt that process wasn't being as displayed as often and as much as they should. And so my project all revolved around, well, why is this? Why is it that some schools are really great at displaying student work and some schools aren't? And basically for our campus, there are lots of things that went into that. And I think the biggest and simplest thing was the lack of norms or guidelines. Teachers just, we didn't have a structured way of doing things. If a teacher wanted to display something, we didn't know where to start. We didn't know who to talk to. We didn't know what was allowed, what was not allowed. We didn't really have a point person to go to. So that's kind of one easy answer to things I was curious about. But the other element that I discovered was going back to what Jeff said earlier about planning and management. And what I learned early on in my project was that a lot of teachers were simply just not thinking about the exhibition or the curation component of their project. It was something that they thought about last minute or it was something that, hey, we're done with the project. Now we got to come up with something to, now we got to come up with an exhibition. So what should we do? And so it was kind of an afterthought. It was what I was getting from my colleagues. And so we're still kind of discussing and working out what are some guidelines we can set up. We've been focusing a lot of our professional development meetings on project design and how we can support each other in making sure that we have all of those critical elements of project-based learning. Which you guys were talking about earlier that authentic audience component is a very critical element of project-based learning. Well, Sonia, it sounds like there's a very interesting intersection in the work that you're doing at High Tech Eye North County and the work of many educators in our audience who might be thinking about sort of beginning the process of exhibitions of learning and so forth. And of course, one tip that you might give them has to, you've already said, the notion of bringing the exhibition or the venue into your project planning. Any other kind of tips that come to mind in terms of what you guys are working out? I would say if I could add anything else, it would be to find an expert. Obviously, Jeff is our expert here at High Tech Eye. He is the art teacher. He knows how to curate not just logistically, but also what makes it look beautiful, what makes it eye-catching. And I think it's really critical for school leaders to identify within their own campuses who is going to be our point person for displaying, not just displaying student work, but displaying it in a way that is beautiful, professional, and will increase student engagement and rigor. And how can we reap all of the benefits of student work display and anything? It's really important to have someone that knows how to do that and that can support the rest of the teachers in doing that. Wait, okay. Thanks, Sonia. Laura, you're at a conference now where there's been some talk. It's an ed tech conference, right? Where there's been some talk about displays of student work and curation and so forth. What are you picking up there? Well, I think there's a lot of things. I mean, I want to touch on a couple things here. This question that I was kind of getting in here is this question of when designing work is, when I'm working with our external teachers, I always ask them, where is the work going to live when it's done? The work should live someplace, someplace in the school, someplace in the community. It's not just this idea, we're not designed with exhibition and actually curation in mind. That's where you start, is when I'm thinking about project design. That's where I start. I think about exhibition and curation first and then reverse engineer from there. That being said, I think there's this question about this idea of curation and getting started with schools, in the sense that people wonder what if the work is not good? How can students curate and do these things if they've never done this before? This idea that work is out there, how do we make it public? And one of the things that's coming up at this conference, there was this session that said everyone is a curator. Everything is curating, whether you're, so right now, every single one of us, probably, and all of our students, are curating their Facebook pages. They're curating their Twitter pages. They're curating their Vine pages. They're actually taking it, they're getting critique. They're getting feedback in real time and actually making changes to that, based on a process that's similar to project-based learning. So this idea that everyone is curating, to me, we can curate our buildings. But students are actually, in real time right now, in the same prop, they're actually curating their work as we speak. And they're curating their personal work. They're curating their own images, their photographs, the things that matter to them. So the question of, they actually know how to curate a little bit already. The question is, how do we actually curate all of the work together so that it is, as Jeff likes to say, this beautiful installation, the process of curation for them, makes sense because they're doing it already. The second piece of the idea of showing your work, of getting it up there, I think is a fear for teachers right away. And so I think this question about how do we start getting work up in the building. I would love to hear from Jeff a little bit too, about what happens when the work is not so great. Because we want every kid's work up there. Not just one, but every kid. And so I'm interested in thinking about how schools think about their work. Not just one kid's work, but every kid's. So again, this idea of curation is something that's happening. And I'll add one more thought to that, is that this idea of curation and exhibition is not a learning or an education piece. It's actually a 21st century skill. It goes beyond the schooling process. It's the process through which students will be engaging through which in their work after they leave schooling. They'll be curating all the time. So how do we get them to doing that now in schools is a skill that we need to start doing. Good point. So it's beyond PR, it's beyond community relations. It really is a really important skill and disposition actually. I'm thinking about Tom here and he's curating your work, your websites, your blogs all the time. That is a process of curating everyone is. And so this question of a digital self, also a physical self, is not just a schooling technique of showing great work in pedagogy and process. But it is a really question of how we're sharing our work with the world that goes beyond just the process of sharing the project that we've done in schools. Everyone except me, Laura, I still get, I'm getting messages every week from Facebook saying, I haven't put where I went to high school yet on my Facebook page. I'll just have to stay behind the times there. You can get critique on that. OK, so I'm going to go to the community. Yeah, that's a great question from Laura about the work of all students and what about the work that's not so good? What do you say to that? Well, we had this visitor, we have tons of visitors come by every year and they said, well, what do you do about student work that's not so good? And before I could answer it, they said, well, it looks like you hang all the work up no matter what. And I was like, oh, well, actually I don't. But I guess their standards were higher than mine. It's the idea that everybody can do the work. Everybody can get to a certain point. And it's something that you definitely shouldn't put everything up. If it's not finished, if the student didn't put the effort into it, by putting up all everybody's work, and if the other kids know, hey, this guy didn't try as hard as he could. He missed deadlines. He didn't take it seriously. And his work's up with mine. And it's not that I'm trying to hurt the kids or I'm trying to keep somebody back. But to reward somebody for not doing work, it seems a little bit, it's going to hurt them in the long run. You have to be honest with them. And that's the idea. I mean, it really comes from art. I mean, there's plenty of artists. There's plenty of people that go to art school. But they don't end up in museums. They don't end up all in galleries. And the people that are at the right place at the right time know how to market themselves. And the people with talent end up in these places. And I think if you design your projects, everyone can be successful in their own ways. So chances are everybody's project's going to be up, or it's going to be displayed. And in very few times, does it ever happen that somebody doesn't get their work up? So it's still kind of really up to the teacher as the person that's pulling the strings to design a project where everyone can be successful. Well, it's interesting. We kind of got out of that question, I guess. Well, it's a conundrum, a real conundrum, Jeff. And you and I have talked about this. Because I mean, we have something we call a common intellectual mission with the same expectations for all kids. So you get a kid who says, well, I don't want to display my work. There's an easy way not to display my work. And that is to not do a good job on it. And then Jeff won't put it up, and I'm off the hook. So I mean, I know that that's not the way you operate and that you support kids to do good work. But it's a conundrum, it really is. And to say to students, your work isn't good enough to put up and leave it there, it seems to me to be a bad place to stop. We need to move forward and to say, okay, we can put up work in progress, we can put up your artist statement, or we can put up next week, but somewhere we have to get everybody up there, it seems to me. Yeah. I mean, we've had people who wanted to say something about some of the work that you've seen in schools and so on. Yeah, I just wanted to add something in terms of, yeah, in terms of deciding what to put up and what not to put up. I think this really goes back to the point about really keeping the curation and exhibition in mind when you're planning the project. I think if you are not telling the students where the work is going to end up, or what the exhibition is going to be like, and you kind of throw that on them at the end of a project, it really won't help the quality of work that you hope to see by giving them this authentic audience. So by introducing that earlier, then the students have that motivation outside of the grade to produce great work, but also as a teacher, I often think about how can I bring more student voice into this and I think by going through examples early on together, creating a rubric together and going over what is beautiful work and what isn't, I think a lot of teachers would be surprised to hear how honest students are and how willing they are to admit, like yeah, this is what it's going to take for it to be displayed at this venue or at school or these are the requirements it's going to meet in order for our team to have this high expectation for ourselves. So I think it's also interesting too to bring students into that conversation and see what they think and what their expectations are for each other. Great point, Sonia, and the notion that pure critique and revision and multiple revision and creating that kind of culture can kind of mitigate or eliminate the issue of the work not being good enough to present if we can create that culture. Tom, what about other ways that schools display student work and how that might relate to our conversation? So as I said, I love the way, I think I display student work, but let's not forget that that's not the only way to present student work. Great. I want to see high school kids writing four or 500 words a day across the curriculum and blogging public audiences at least weekly if not more frequently and capturing samples on a regular basis of their best work in a digital portfolio. And so if, and maybe add to that contributing to publications sponsored by the school or in the community. So if kids are blogging and capturing a portfolio, then a gallery space in a school is just another way for them to exhibit their work and it sort of de-escalates the stakes associated with the gallery space. I think it allows you to be a bit more selective. And as Sonia said, I think you can have peer review by students help make decisions about student work that might go into gallery space. So if kids are doing exhibition and they're blogging and they're capturing portfolio and there's gallery space and presentations, right? And then there's lots of ways that every student has worked that they're proud of that's out in a public way. Thank you, Tom. And by the way, for the audience, we've just had a Haitekei student as a contributor to the Education Week learning deeply blog. So we'll put that URL up and you can check that up too as an instance of students sharing work and sharing thinking more publicly. Laura, I think you had something else to add here. Yeah, I mean, we can jump into the, I know there was a question about exhibition applying to things that are not art and that's coming from the community here. Someone asked, Peter Pultain, how does exhibition apply to things that are not art? Is there a higher purpose than the show? And I think that kind of gets to my question about exhibition and curation of work. This question that we're showing good pieces, the pieces that are most proud of. And I'm working on a piece right now for our blog thing about this idea of one of the things that I think when we start looking at work here, obviously at this conference, and when we walk around places of inspiration, we get inspired to do something, something that's visual, something that's technical, something that's inspirational, inspires you to do great work. Tom just came back from Southwest too. You're inspired to do more things when you're surrounded by things that are inspiring. And I think the purpose of having work curated in the school does two things. One, I walk around and I see Jeff's work and I see Jeff's students work and I'm inspired to do cool things and great things. But it also turns the conversation to what we think standards of quality are in our building. And I think, I know going back to the 10 years ago when we had work in our schools, that wasn't so good, it was okay. It was great, not so great. And the quality got better because the conversation was about the work. It was about the student work that was on the walls. And then that conversation evolved over and over and over. So we became this consensus about what we thought good work does. And I think in schools that are looking to up their game or create a culture of critique or create a culture in which students are sharing their work, one has to have the work up in the buildings because that's where the conversation begins. It doesn't begin in a small conversation, it begins because you stop and you see something that inspires you, that makes you question and that's where things are happening. So I think this idea of curation and exhibition has a conversation about what we're after with deeper learning. Because sometimes, we've been working on deeper learning and we may not know what it looks like until we see it. And so the more we can see visual examples of it, the clearer we have a consensus about what it looks like in our school. So I think it has this impact on culture that goes beyond just showing the work. Okay, and it's not just visual as well. I think Jeff wanted to make a point about the Socratic seminars and so forth, Jeff. Yeah, so I work with a humanities teacher and he was talking about Russo and Kant and he wanted to engage the students and show what they've learned. And when the parents came, we had them debate in front of them. They did get dressed up and then we made costumes and we did make artifacts of that time period that would allow people to understand maybe concepts. But the kids spoke to each other as if they were these philosophers and they were standing around and that was one of the most amazing presentations I've ever been to where it was almost like a play. And so it doesn't have to be a physical thing displayed. That said, you can display physics. You can put writing on the wall. You can display things like art that are from other subject areas and it's valid and it's there all the time and somebody's gonna maybe take their time and look at it instead of it being locked away on the internet or stuck in a book somewhere. If it's out on the walls, people have a chance to take a look at it. So you don't have to be an art teacher. You just have to show the work. You have to make it alive and put it in there. I like your comment about displaying writing. I remember one of the most impressive or an interesting displays I saw at Aitakai was a teacher. Kids were doing a lot of writing and they were writing journals and he simply, and this was a way of getting all students to actually display their work. Everyone had a journal. He said, go back in your journal, pick an entry that you want to share with the world and work on it a little bit and then frame it in some way. Put some art around it or design or whatever. We're gonna put these up on the wall. And so the kids redid their journal entries but everyone had one to display and then they created something around it and put it up. It was a nice way of getting all the kids involved. And it was actually kind of cool because when you write a journal, it's your little journal. And what I did was I took it away and I scanned it and printed it really large so their little tiny journal became a really big piece of art and they scratched some stuff out and they maybe drew some more things on it. But it enabled somebody to do something in a safe way but then to put it out there and make it bigger so that other people could see it. And that goes with anything, I think. Yeah. Karen, did you have a question to bring in from the audience? I think Sonya might have had a point on this topic she wanted to make first. Okay, good. Yeah, so I was just thinking whenever I have my students doing something or working on a project, I always try to think about, well, what are they doing and what real world skill are they bringing in and who might be using this, what professional person might be using the skill in the real world. I try to have that exhibit kind of mimic that. So if they are presenting a writing piece, how might an author exhibit their creative writing or their writing in front of an audience and that might be a reading, that might be some sort of spoken word. And so that's how I kind of think about exhibits. Like if they are, yeah, if it's just a piece of art they might display it and have an art reception or an art show or something. But I don't think you can just limit it to artists. I think you can think about writers, you can think about scientists and other anthropologists and historians and what are those people doing out there in the real world, how are they exhibiting it. And when it comes to writing, because I'm a humanities teacher, I do think about this quite often, but one of the things I think teachers dwell on in terms of exhibiting writing is that they feel it's necessary to exhibit the entire thing. And I think it's okay to not display the entire thing and maybe just taking components that the students are really proud of or enjoy the most. And again, I think you mentioned it earlier, maybe putting it up in a frame with some other designs or art around it. And I think we dwell on the fact that, well, they wrote this thing and so I have to display the whole thing and I don't know that that's necessarily the case. Right. Well, it can be pretty deadly to go to an exhibition and have 40, 20 page essays to look at. So yeah, there may be ways around that. For example, saying to students, pick the most powerful paragraph or the paragraph that you're proudest of in the piece that you've written and let's put that up for people to look at something, things like that. Okay, we haven't done much yet in this conversation about audience. What about audiences? We've touched on it a little bit, but is there more to say about audiences for student work and finding audiences and what are the proper and powerful audiences for student work? Anybody? I wanna sort of build on that too with just a question that has to do with audience, but this is from the DL MOOC group and I was really glad to hear Tom bring up sharing work online because in my work, that's sort of, that's a hugely powerful way to share student work, but I know there are also sometimes questions and concerns about that. So we have a question from Celeste who says, are there suggestions for how to display student work online that can protect student identities and provide a larger audience for their creations? And we had a similar question today on the G Plus community about how to deal with parents who are concerned with sharing work either online or possibly in public spaces. And I think my response to that was lead with the positives. And I think from a parent standpoint, when parents see the benefits of sharing student work, it's less of a concern, but also obviously we have to really teach students about the pros and cons of sharing online and again, it gets back to the whole curation thing. So I'm interested in more thoughts on both online and in public spaces, sort of how you bring the audience consideration in and address concerns. Great. Okay, Laura, did you wanna chime in? Well, mine was less about the privacy issue and I think there's more educated people in this panel that can talk about that. But I think my question, my thought was really is the question back to us as a panel is where does the audience role begin? I think when we think about audience, we're often thinking about the exhibition and we're thinking about the ending of the project. And I'm gonna propose that we think about audience at the beginning of the project. I'm thinking about a project at the very start of who is the audience for this work? What is the questions this audience gonna have? How am I interacting with the audience at the beginning of the project? Not at the end. If we don't do it at the end, then how is it a real life project, a realistic, authentic project? Again, going to a design theory process or design thinking process, we start with the audience first and begin there in the project design. So I'm just articulating out that, and there's lots of ways to interact with the audience, bring the audience into the project during exhibition, but I wanna argue that I think it's really about the audience at the beginning of the project as opposed to thinking it as the end results. Tom, did you wanna chime in on that? Well, let me just use NYC iSchool.org, the iSchool in New York City as a good example. It's a problem-based school and they always start with a client-based problem and the client as the audience. So to Laura's point, their real world problem, real world audience gives you real clarity around a deliverable. And then I'll just add a second example of this is, this is what I think kids at least once a week and thinking about a public audience or two, this is really going to a worldwide audience, it's work that I have to take seriously. I'm likely to get feedback on it. People that want to find out who I am as a worker are going to be able to look at my work online. And I think it helps make that shift in audience and agency. One of the things that we've been thinking about in our graduate school as we talk about project design, and this is kind of a variation on audience. And that is to consult experts in the actual design of the project, who then become actually the audience for the project later on. But it's from the standpoint of someone in the community who's kind of helping out or participating in some way, it's much more satisfying to be in on the project through the various steps and to be talking with kids than to simply come in and be on a panel at the end. So we're finding that's about a really useful way, not useful, but rewarding way to bring people in. Not simply as audience, but as an informed audience, an audience that's assisting as well. Sometimes client, sometimes co-planer. It's kind of amazing who is the audience because we just did this project and we had all these scientists and people that are working at this laboratory, and then we also had students come and we also had other educators come and see this work. And then I heard a mother of an elementary school student said, wow, my son was really impressed with those paintings of the melanoma and he really started putting on sunscreen. And that's the thing, when you display work, when you put things out there, you're gonna get all kinds of responses back from people. And then that is kind of like the more beautiful thing than that can response, oh, these people are gonna love it. But if you don't show your work, nobody's ever gonna see it. I often say you're not an artist if all your paintings are in your mother's garage. You have to show something. And everybody really is an artist. Not everybody's a good artist, but I mean, it's, everybody can be an artist. Everybody can be a curator. And you have to practice. You have to get yourself out there. And not worrying about it. I mean, and we say, don't worry about it, but everybody has a job and everybody's working and they want their kids to be happy and they wanna seem in this need to be perfect, the perfect teacher. But you gotta make mistakes. I mean, I always say, I gotta make more mistakes and I'm achieving it very well. And you also, you need to keep pushing yourself as a teacher, as a student, and as somebody that's tried to learn or be successful. So this is a great place for the kids to start and to feel what it's like to make a mistake in this safe place. Can I jump in on that? Cause I think, you know, in our DL MOOC here, having been in this course now for how many weeks? So we can do now 13, it feels like 10 weeks, five weeks, two weeks, I don't know. But we have a large number of, eight, thank you. We've got a large number of schools who are in varying stages of project-based learning of deeper learning in their schools. And so we've been talking about bringing the audience in and the community in the beginning. And that might be fearful. They might not have close connections to their community right away. And so I think there's a question, as Jeff was getting in, is making mistakes with your own audience. I think there's something to be had, if you have an exhibition, you have a school-wide exhibition and you invite all of your parents in and as many parents as you can and community members. And that will be their first time too. And so we have to help them think about great questions to ask our kids. What questions do they need help with? Because they haven't done this work either. And so putting that to helping them along with questions whether the students are generating, the teachers are generating, I think is a step in the right direction because that might be new for parents and community members as well. And again, they'll make mistakes. And if you're not doing it yet, having exhibitions and curation in your school, that's okay. But one way to do it, of course, is to start and helping your parents and the community members start and give them some questions to start with. I think one of the great values of both of exhibition and of periodic presentations of learning is that these can be done in any learning environment. I mean, you don't have to be a super-duper project-based learning environment to display artifacts of student work. And you don't have to be a particular kind of learning environment to ask students to periodically, before a panel, articulate what they've learned, what they need and where they think they're headed. So these are things that can be put in place anywhere tomorrow. And that if put in place, my view is that they would make life better for students in those places. We have a question from Jeff Lohman in the audience. Do many people have exhibitions outside the school? Any problems experienced with this? Jeff, you do a lot of exhibiting outside the school. What are you saying? I wouldn't say there are problems. I mean, there's just different challenges. Making sure that you get enough people there to make it feel meaningful to the students. Working with the people, because a lot of times when they're working with high school students, they think, oh, this is just gonna be high school. This isn't gonna be serious. And we had an exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and my students killed it. It was fantastic. They were just the people that ran the museum. They were very nice people, but they were just blown away. But we really put the time and effort into it. My students visited the museum four times that semester. And that's a lot of field trips. That's a lot of just getting people there and logistics. So it's not a problem. It's just a lot of work. And I'm not saying that it's any better to have it out in the real world or have it at school. I mean, we've had ones at school and 2,000 people show up, which is pretty amazing. And I think people in our society might feel more comfortable coming to a school than going to an art gallery, per se. But it all started in the beginning. It all started with when we made this project, we decided this was where the exhibition was gonna be. And that was maybe either me and my teaching partner and a few students, or the whole group of students, saying, look, this is what we're gonna do, and we gotta figure out how to get there. Great, thanks, Jeff. So I wonder if we have, anybody has ideas about, Lauren, did you have something you wanted to say about? Well, and maybe you can add on to this, because I think, so I just saw Chase Jarvis present and he essentially did an exhibition. He stood up for 40 minutes and did a lecture, which is really, you could imagine, someone standing in a room, right, and talking about their work. And he finished his presentation with 20 minutes to go, and he said, I would love to get some questions, because this is where it gets interesting. And so one of the things that I think when we think about, maybe this is the do's and the don'ts, is how are we structuring the exhibition or the exhibition itself that allows for dialogue for, between the audience and the students. Because that is, and I know Rob has lots of thoughts about that, but I think this question of how are we actually physically structuring it so that there's lots of dialogue, because I have seen in schools where they say they're having an exhibition and the students are standing up and saying, this is my project. And here, and I'm done. I have nothing left to say. I did this work, and this is the project, and now it's done. And while that's interesting, as an audience member, I'm not so interested in the content. Actually, I'm more interested in the processes that they engaged and how their thinking has changed as a result of the work. And so those are the questions that I'm thinking about is this question of dialogue and audience engagement. It's just something I'd like to hear from other people as well. Yeah, we've had a lot of, we're moving towards a lot of presentations, a lot of exhibitions at the High Tech High now where, in fact, it is the process that is put on display. And students are standing at stations representing various points in the process along the way and telling onlookers and visitors what happened at that step and what was coming next and so on. Tom, did you want to weigh in? Well, I think Laura's suggesting it's super interesting. I've taken over the last couple of years to starting almost every presentation with sort of a crowdsourced answer to a probing question and then exposing my earlier thinking to it. And I think I had never thought about a PUL done in that way, but that'd be interesting to teach kids sort of high engagement presentation strategies. Yeah, and Sonia. Yeah, this reminds me of a reflection prompt I often give my students at the end of a project. And this is a very High Tech High lingo and I don't know if it came from you, Robert, Larry, but just three sentence starters. Once I thought and then I saw and now I see. And so I teach ninth grade, so I need to really scaffold and support my students and make their thinking visible. And so if it's right before a PUL or an exhibition or something where the students are gonna have to explain their thinking process and their experience with this project, if I just give them those three sentence starters a day or two before and we really talk as a class about, okay, what did you think before? What did you see during the duration of this project and how has that changed your thinking? And really breaking it down in a simple way and it's great because it's really clear, it's really simple and then the students can then also convey to the audience in a very succinct and simple way and then if they want more information they can ask further questions, but it's a great prompt that I really love to give my ninth grade students. I love that idea, Sonia, I think one of the balances that we over the years have tried to strike well at High Tech High is the balance between, and we're talking about presentations of learning now, not so much exhibitions, but presentations of learning where you, at the end of the year, review the year and make the case that you're ready to go on to the next year. The question is, is this an occasion for dialogue or is it an accountability event? And who owns the presentation? Does the student own it around the learning or does ownership lie elsewhere around the content? So we've had presentations of learning where the format was tell us what you've learned in math, tell us what you've learned in humanities and so on. And we've had others where the format is bring in an artifact that shows how you have progressed in the habit of mind of evidence. Bring in another artifact that shows how you've progressed and what you've learned around the habit of mind of perspective. And by the way, of the artifacts that you bring in, one must be from humanities, one must be from math science and so forth. So it's a different kind of focus. And so what are we talking about? What is the student talking about? What I've learned and what I own of the learning and here's the evidence or is it an accountability event where now I need to show what I know in this subject and this subject. In other words, is it subject-based or is it artifact-based around learning as the student defines it? It's an interesting balance that we're trying to strike all the time. Okay, I think, Jeff, did you wanna say something more about? Oh, well, it's back to the idea of what to do when you have all these students doing projects and how do you show them together. And I always, I think of the idea of balance, symmetry and repetition. You need to have these qualities so that you present the work like it's a series of work that there's different students doing them, but they all have it. There's something that draws it all together to make it a collection of pieces. And it's like when I say to teachers, if you have to hang it sideways on the wall to make it interesting, maybe you shouldn't hang it on the wall at all. It's these ideas, these parameters that we start with ahead of time. And because I do the projects myself first, I know how it's gonna look. And I know I beat this drum to death and there's a lot of people that are tired of hearing it. But because I've done the projects myself first, I know how it's gonna look and where it's gonna be. And that's the single most important thing that I could think about in understanding as coming from a teacher. If I know where I'm going, I'm gonna be able to leave my students there in a clearer way. And I'm gonna know what's gonna happen in the, I'll have a better idea of what's gonna happen in the exhibition if I leave from point of experience instead of a point of... Laura, I know that you've been working with a lot of schools all over the world basically and have some observations about the kinds of things you see on the walls when you walk into schools. Do you like to say a little bit about that? Well, I think that's one of the things is this question of one of the things that I'm wondering about right now is what does the walls, what do the walls say about the schooling that's happening in the building? What does the wall say about what the school values and teaching and learning? I think one of the things that we have all this great wall space in schools and yet they're often underutilized or they don't necessarily attempt to represent the school's true values or aspirations toward what critical thinking and student thinking is. And so one of the things that I wanted to show, for example, one of our hopes, I think at our school at High Tech High is to somehow show student work that really aspires to show our aspirations towards student thinking, voice, and choice. It doesn't always happen. Obviously, we don't get it right all the time and sometimes work is not so great and Jeff gets really mad and it happens. But that's our attempt. So I want to show you really quickly just I think this question of when we think about what work looks like. Karen, you want to show the first slide. So I just pulled up randomly when I was getting ready here today. A picture of what I would consider just a random, I found this school online, just a picture of a school that I found on the internet. I think it's published, you can find it. And then I show another couple of slides. For some reason I can't see all those slides, Karen, but I'm sure they're showing to the community. You might want to show the next few slides that show how we've displayed student work in our schools. And I think one of the things that we're hoping for is this question is how is the work transforming or showing the thinking that we value? So you'll see in this image right here, you'll see a chemistry, it's a geometry project that I believe, Jeff, you did that project with Daisy that had to do with geometry and this question of how can we display work? Where can we display work is interesting. Maybe we'll go to the next one. And this one, these pictures really get at Jeff's point about basically balance and symmetry. Maybe show the next one. Next one. I just grabbed a few sampling. I like this one, it's a spaces in between where can you find work, where can you display work that you wouldn't necessarily expect it to be. Jeff talked about the bathrooms, this is between the staircase, I think is really interesting. I saw a timeline that was basically done on a staircase throughout a school. Instead of a time on a poster, it actually was, each step was the timeline, which made sense, you're moving through it physically. And then they'll keep going, I think. And there should be maybe one more. So really, when I'm thinking about this idea of symmetry is where in the work is gonna live and this idea of going out and finding places in the school that really can, showing the work in such a way that really does demonstrate the thinking that you aspire to have the students do in the school and then finding it and showing it in interesting places in your school. Okay, thanks Laura. And I would remind our audience to check the deeper learning site for more resources around exhibitions and presentations of learning and so forth. We're running to the end of this session regrettably, but so now it's gonna be time to go do a once around with the panel where we invite each panelist to say that one more thing briefly that they would like to say to our audience and to our colleagues on the panel. So who would like to lead off? We'll do this once around and then we'll turn it back over to Ryan to exit for the end of the evening. I can go Rob if no one else wants to. Okay. I think just the last thing I wanna mention is, I think we tell our students all the time to take risks, take challenges and be a little uncomfortable and that's when the learning really happens. And for teachers that are trying to do this and are a little bit scared of it or school leaders that are trying to do more of this and are a little fearful, just like the old Nike saying, just do it. Just do it, get work up there, figure out what works for your school, what works for you and your students and your teaching style. And you really don't know until you start doing it and figuring out what works best for you. So take a risk and start putting work up. Great, thanks, Sonia. Who's next? I like her theme on this and, oh, sorry, Tom. I like her theme on this because I heard of a drama teacher say, well, if you're not in trouble with administration, you're not teaching drama correctly. And I'd like to bring that into all aspects of our education. You gotta go out there and try something, do something. And the kids are gonna love it and you're gonna feel so much happier about it. Thank you. Who's next? I wanna follow up on this comment that Sonia and Jeff made of this idea being courageous. There was a quote, I think, I'm trying to think of which session I heard it in today. But it was this idea that if you're not causing trouble, you're probably not being creative enough. And so I think I wanna kind of put it out to people that the only way to get student work up in the school is to put student work up in the school. And yes, it might be troublesome and it might cause some challenges, but the only way to have a conversation about what learning is, is when you start looking at it in your building. So that's just my final thought. Good. And Tom? I just wanna stress, writing every day, blogging every week, capturing personal best in a portfolio every month, public presentations and learning at least three or four times a year. Thank you, Tom. And I would say I wanna just go back a little bit to the early years of High Tech High when we had our first exhibition of learning, a number of our faculty were saying, the kids aren't ready yet and we put it off a little bit and we put it off and then we had our exhibition and everyone said, wow, we should have done this three months ago. So exhibitions are a disruptive technology. They push us out of our comfort zone and they engage schools in a kind of transparency that schools are not accustomed to. So they're disruptive in that way, but in that way they're also really, really rewarding. So I think with that note and with the note of encouraging everyone in our audience to take that leap and go ahead and get engaged in supporting your students in displaying their work and also in displaying your own work as adults in the school will turn it over to Ryan to close us out. Thank you so much to all the panel and thanks to the audience for being with us. Thank you, Rob. I just wanted to add that as the MOOC ends, we're kind of looking at what lasting impact this course has had and I think, Rob, that's a great point which is what we really want here is that people are actually going out and putting these things into practice, that they're going out in their community and exhibiting their work and I think the most powerful learning experiences and the most powerful feedback we've gotten from our audiences when we see, our school is now trying exhibitions, our school is now looking at student work protocols and those kinds of things. So I would encourage our audience to continue to share those thoughts, especially as we go into our last week, our week of reflection. One note, logistic note, that we will not have a live panel this Thursday. We're gonna go take some video footage of High Tech High School of VISTA that's in the process of prepping for an exhibition, their big exhibition. So we'll take some pre-footage and we'll share that with our community and then we'll come back the night of exhibition and kind of show you what their process and talk to a couple kids about that. So that's in lieu of our Thursday conversation. So thank you everybody for joining us. Thanks to our panel and thanks to Rob as always for being such a great facilitator and we'll see you guys next Monday.