‘Performance’ Gets a New Meaning at Los Naranjos

At Los Naranjos School, kids are encouraged to show off.

In kindergarten class, they recite nursery rhymes in front of a video camera. In fifth grade, they write letters to everyone from their parents to the President. And in sixth grade, they become characters from early Egyptian history and appear before an audience of classmates and friends.

The goal is to let children “show off” what they have learned by performing an activity that demonstrates their knowledge.

In educational jargon, the concept is called assessment by exhibition. Think of it as a radical alternative to the multiple choice test, and you begin to get the idea.

Principal Bruce Baron says it is helpful to think of an exhibition as a performance. Just as actors get ready for a performance by studying dialogue, memorizing and practicing, children at Los Naranjos must learn all about a subject, then must practice, revise and finally give an actual performance.

The final performance is their final exam, but in between there are several “quizzes” or rehearsals to help the pupils prepare for the big year-end show.

For example, in kindergarten, the subject is language. Each pupil has to get up in front of class and give an oral presentation. One of the first assignments is to describe an object in three ways. Tasks get progressively more complex. Pupils are expected to recite a poem, retell a story and explain and demonstrate how to do something.

In a recent class, 5-year-old Nikki Taylor recited a nursery rhyme while teacher Ginger Longwell recorded the performance with a video camera. Throughout the year, Nikki will continue to work on her oral language skills, and Longwell will continue to record her progress.

The goals, Longwell says, are to teach the children to speak in a loud voice before a group, to speak clearly, to face the audience and to say five things in order.

“It is really exciting to see the progress,” Longwell says. “The kids like it, and so do the parents. Parents say they really see growth in their children’s speaking skills.”

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Baron says a look at a year-end tape shows the method’s effectiveness. “At the end of the year, watching the tape is like watching time-lapse photography,” says Baron, who helped introduce the performance concept into his school two years ago. “It’s like seeing a flower unfold.”

In Jane Holm’s fifth-grade class, the subject is writing, and each pupil must master the skills of writing a persuasive letter. “They can write to a family member, a person in history. This year some of them want to write to President(-elect) Clinton,” Holm says.

During the year, pupils will write several letters as they hone their skills, and Holm says this opportunity to keep working and improving is important to pupils.

“Lots of time kids don’t get to reflect on their work and then make it better next time,” she says. “But in real life that’s what we do, work on something until it is our best.”

As a testing method, the performance exhibitions are better indicators of what a child has learned, Holm says. “For certain things, you will still need traditional tests,” she says. “But I would like to see this replace a lot of testing.”

So would most of the children, according to Penny Knox, who uses the technique to teach writing and social studies in her sixth grade class.

“The children prefer it over a test,” she says. “True and false questions and book tests don’t really show what they know, but what they don’t know. So children have a fear of these kinds of tests.”

In Knox’s class, pupils must write from the perspective of a historical figure, describing the social, economical and political systems of the time in which the figure lived. Throughout the year, children perform exercises preparing for the final exam, which is written in class. After the written portion of the performance, children must present their work to an audience, taking on the characteristics of the historical figure.

“They don’t know what figure they have to write as until they get to class that day,” Knox says. “Some will be writing as if they were a slave building the great pyramids, while others might be kings.”

What the children learn this way, they retain, Knox says. “They really know it over the year,” she says, “rather than just memorizing it for a test. I think it is a wonderful way to help children focus on their goals for a year’s worth of learning. And it is a great way to show me, as a teacher, what I have to teach.”

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Although the exhibition method is not new, it is more common to see it used on a high school rather than elementary school level, according to Baron. Because of Los Naranjos’ pioneering work in adapting the method to primary grades, teachers at the school are frequently called upon to present their ideas to other educators.

The first step in designing an exhibition program, Baron says, is deciding on a goal. “We say, ‘What is the most important thing we want for the kids?’ And then we work backward to say, ‘How can we make sure they get it, and how can we demonstrate they got it?’ ”

The key is providing a model that shows the end result.

“In a football game you could throw passes all day and run plays, but unless you have a vision of what a game looks like, you’re limited. So, for example, our kindergarten children get to see a video tape of what others look like (successfully performing) so that they know what they are working toward. That picture does a lot. And in the sixth grade, we provide models of . . . good writing.”

The performance method, in its third year at Los Naranjos, is used only in language arts and social studies. But Baron says it will work equally well in other subjects, including math and science.

Because all exhibitions take place at school, Baron says, cheating is discouraged. “It gets away from the idea that you could copy or fake this,” he says.