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A Culture of Exhibitions Begins to Take Hold

Type: Example from Schools Author(s): Kathleen Cushman Source: Performance. No. 10. June 1994.

Heathwood Hall Episcopal School
3000 South Beltline Boulevard
Columbia, South Carolina 29201
(803) 765-2309

J. Robert Shirley, Headmaster
778 students, grades pre-K¯12
78 full- and part-time staff
25% receive financial aid
12% minority students
100% go on to college
Independent school, est. 1951

By building senior year around a final project, this school has cast a shadow backwards over its earlies grades on through high school.

GUESTS AT THE SENIOR THESIS symposium held a few weeks before graduation this year at Heathwood Hall Episcopal School might well have used this occasion to do a bit of recruiting for their companies or colleges. One by one, 54 seniors rise to the stage?dressed to the teeth, rehearsed till every explanation comes fluently, often without even the prompting of notes?to deliver before their assembled community the culmination of a year-long independent project. The ritual tests every quality?persistence, thoughtfulness, scholarship, originality, social awareness, sheer discipline?an interviewer might desire. These young adults cannot hide what kind of thinkers and workers they have become; here in this auditorium, everyone can see it for themselves.

Duncan Belsen, for one, gets a contract offer from a local computer company out of his exhibition. He has spent the year putting together an interactive mixed-media computer program based on the third book of Virgil's Aeneid. Click here in the Latin text, he shows the audience, and they will see his own translation. Click this icon and a map appears of the Trojans' Bronze Age sea voyage from Troy to Carthage; click that one and Ascanius appears on screen to summarize his travails. The computer game is yet to come, but no one in the audience doubts that Duncan can do it, and will.

Louisa Weathers follows, a young artist who thought at the start of this year that she could learn to paint like Monet by meticulously researching and practicing his style. With slightly sheepish Southern grace she acknowledges what she learned instead: "Style comes from within." The audience follows her learning path through journals and paintings, and the key point emerges toward the end of the presentation, when Louisa displays her own work with its distinctive signature, recognizing what she has learned from Claude Monet. "I am not an impressionist," she concludes. "I am a realist."

To pass muster, these students must also defend their work before a committee comprising teachers, students, and an outside expert in the field; and they must write a research paper supporting their thesis topic. Standards are high; if the work does not display proficiency by June, the senior must keep plugging through the summer or beyond. "

Until now, senior spring was pretty apathetic," observes Head-master Bob Shirley. "There were always a half-dozen kids who had never addressed a topic in depth. Once they had to go before an exhibition committee, their studies became more real, more authentic. They knew they had to stick their necks out, and the community knew it too."

Planning Backwards

This school adopted the principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools in 1987, embracing the individual learning, high expectations for every student, and climate of decency that CES stands for. But in recent years, its faculty has pushed its Essential School commitment even further by creating a culture that expects students to demonstrate their understanding in public.

The Class of 1994 is the first to "graduate by exhibition" as Duncan and Louisa are doing. But at every grade level and in every subject area, the new requirement has prompted teachers to put more emphasis on linking disciplines through essential questions, locating academic questions in a real-world context that has meaning to students, and encouraging thoughtful inquiry in depth rather than rote learning across a broad but shallow curriculum.

Ninth-graders, for example, start the year by visiting the site of a "car crash" on the long approach road to Heathwood's 133-acre campus near South Carolina's interstate highway. In pairs they measure skid marks, mark where the bodies fell, collect forensic data; then, through a series of labs, demonstrations, and calculations, they deduce the facts of the case. "It was one of those 'Aha!' experiences for my ninth-grade son," says Middle School principal Jane Ness. "He could have learned 25 formulas and still never been able to explain it the way he did."

"We have set an explicit goal to have more graduates go on to major in math and science," says Upper School principal Lark Palma. To that end Heathwood no longer tracks students in those subjects; instead, all eighth graders take Algebra 1, and in their next two years students take both math and a double block of inte-grated science courses with names like "Force and Motion," and "Properties of Matter." "By the end of tenth grade they will have spiraled through the equivalent of a year of chemistry, a year of physics, and two years of biological science," Palma says. Again, the focus is on demonstrating their learning in authentic ways; tenth-grade students reported on how the campus's three major water sources suffered from nearby building developments, highway improvements, farm fertilizers, and a wastewater treatment plant.

The emphasis on interdisciplinary learning and performance assessment reaches deep into the lower grades here. The middle school integrates the study of the arts and humanities with Spanish language study in a strand that extends through eleventh grade. The lower grades' math curriculum has become more rigorous and individualized as teachers begin to expect high levels from all students. Both Palma and Ness agree that while Heathwood's top students remain challenged, those who previously achieved at lower levels are accomplishing much more in the Essential School climate.

"We eliminated all but one of our six Advanced Placement courses," says Palma. "But we still encourage anyone who wants to take the AP exams." Now twice as many students as before take the rigorous exams, and just as many?fully 91 percent in 1993?scored a "3" or better.

Heathwood's SAT scores continue to register 200 to 300 points above the South Carolina average. It sends 98 percent of students on to four-year colleges, and Palma notes that those who previously achieved at lower levels increasingly gain acceptance at more selective colleges.

Teachers here have made a habit of pushing both students and themselves toward excellence. In a three-day debriefing just after graduation, they critiqued the senior exhibitions and revised their approach so as to provoke more original and scholarly work. They argued out what merits the highest label of "distinction," and how to use the outside experts better and earlier to measure student work against real-world standards.

"This push for exhibitions has forced our conversations both with students and with each other to a new level," said teacher Ted Graf. "We're all performing outside the comfort zone." Around the room, his colleagues nodded, well pleased.

This resource last updated: May 14, 2002

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