Volume 80 December 1, 2008 A Job Well Done
When Superintendent Dr. Kriner Cash and Deputy Superintendent Irving Hamer Jr. decided to hold a Districtwide Exhibition of Student Work, they tapped the team of Judy Jackson and Patti Butas to help them prepare for the exhibition. Under the leadership of Dr. Cash and Hamer, Jackson and Butas served as capable guides, adeptly helping schools navigate through the uncharted waters of the first-ever Districtwide exhibition. Planning for the exhibition was a team effort, with Jackson and Butas meeting frequently with a task force composed of members of numerous departments of Memphis City Schools. Like an expectant mother visiting her doctor for regular exams in preparation for giving birth to a baby, the task force met monthly, and then weekly, as the exhibition date neared.
When Superintendent Dr. Kriner Cash and Deputy Superintendent Irving Hamer Jr. decided to hold a Districtwide Exhibition of Student Work, they tapped the team of Judy Jackson and Patti Butas to help them prepare for the exhibition. Under the leadership of Dr. Cash and Hamer, Jackson and Butas served as capable guides, adeptly helping schools navigate through the uncharted waters of the first-ever Districtwide exhibition. Planning for the exhibition was a team effort, with Jackson and Butas meeting frequently with a task force composed of members of numerous departments of Memphis City Schools. Like an expectant mother visiting her doctor for regular exams in preparation for giving birth to a baby, the task force met monthly, and then weekly, as the exhibition date neared. The project began with a simple, yet ambitious, concept by Dr. Cash and Hamer. Every child in every school would create and display a project that represented his best work from the first three months of school. Once the initiative was announced, the exhibition team worked together to define the initiative, and then to develop a master plan to guide the implementation of the project. The plan was then outlined in a concept paper, and then in a brochure that articulated the plan to the District.
Jackson, a former principal, and Butas, a former instructional facilitator, had worked together in the past at Oakshire, an elementary school that was based on a project-based-learning model, so the pair was well versed in using student-created projects as an educational tool. The pair was also well acquainted with a theory that was used in the exhibition, Robert J. Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of Intelligence. This theory states that intelligence is composed of three factors: the analytical, the creative, and the practical, all of which were represented by projects displayed in the exhibition. Although most people are strongest in one of the three areas of intelligence, project-based learning allows students to cultivate all three of the intelligences and to put them to work together to produce a tangible artifact integrating and demonstrating what they’ve learned, Jackson said. The exhibition allowed schools to offer students an alternative means of assessment, giving them a chance to produce a project that demonstrated what they knew, rather than giving them a traditional test. “This goes beyond what they can demonstrate on a paper-and-pencil test,” Butas said. “This allowed the students to demonstrate what they know and what they can do,” Jackson agreed. Much of the exhibition’s success was due to a grassroots effort, Jackson said. Each school appointed a ‘curator’ to create an exhibition-day ‘museum’ where museum-quality work was displayed. “We used the term ‘museum’ from the beginning,” Jackson said. “It was a way of getting across the expectation of museum-quality work.” And museum-quality it was. Every school rose to the expectation of producing a museum-quality exhibition, with each school displaying impressive projects, ranging from an intricately and authentically designed, life-sized Renaissance-era dress made out of wrapping paper, to reproductions of the first microscope and the Gutenberg press; a five-foot-tall working catapult; a wall-sized timeline of hairstyles through the ages, with the numerical titles of the decades written with fake hair; a gigantic book that opened so living characters could walk out of the book and talk to exhibition visitors about the books; a board game about the rain forest; an assortment of exquisite artwork; and a plethora of other imaginative, well-crafted projects in virtually every medium and about virtually any topic you could think of. Producing high-quality work, and having a juror from the community take the time to come view the projects, was a great boost to students’ self-esteem, Butas said. “They were so proud of their work,” Butas said. The team heard countless touching stories about the positive impact that the exhibition made on students. “Children were touched that someone thought their work was important enough for someone to come look at it,” Butas said. “That’s empowering.” To make sure that every child’s project got the attention that it deserved in the form of a thorough critique, the exhibition team faced one of its biggest challenges: recruiting 4,000 volunteers to serve as jurors. But even that challenge was met with overwhelming success, when over 5,100 community members stepped forward to volunteer to serve as jurors. It was important to the team that the community participate in the exhibition, to get the community’s input on the projects and to encourage more community involvement in Memphis City Schools, Jackson said. “We wanted the community involved in this,” she said. According to Butas, she and Jackson were both very impressed, not only by the quantity of the jurors, but by their quality. “They took their role very seriously, and they truly tried to analyze the work,” Butas said. It was exciting to watch the jurors’ “Aha!” responses to both the students’ work and to the schools themselves, Butas said. “Many jurors told us that they had never been in a Memphis City School before, and they were impressed by the order, quality work, and cleanliness in the schools,” Butas said. Several jurors remarked that they were so impressed by the school they visited, that they now want to enroll their child in that school. Jackson also witnessed that same positive reaction from jurors. “People saw what quality work is done in all Memphis City Schools,” Jackson said. In addition to receiving valuable input on their projects from the jurors, students also benefited from being given an opportunity to explain their projects to the jurors and other visitors, allowing the students to articulate their knowledge about their project’s subject, Butas said. Along with the successful involvement of the community in the exhibition, another of the initiative’s successes was “the excitement of the students; the engagement of the students,” Jackson said. The students eagerly met, and even exceeded, the high expectations that were outlined for their exhibition projects, Jackson said. “There were impressive pieces everywhere!” Jackson noted. “I saw so many, many excellent projects.” The exhibition team was excited to see how engaged the students were as they prepared for the exhibition, which not only boosted the students’ self-esteem, but also allowed them to experience applied learning and integration and learn problem solving, creativity, and practical skills, while exploring a topic of interest to the student. “That’s what you want children to take from this,” Butas said, “that learning can be engaging.” Seeing the exhibition progress from its initial concept to its successful completion has been an incredible experience, Jackson said. “It has been very rewarding to us to see the fruition of this project,” she said. Although teachers and administrators always have a full workload, they graciously and enthusiastically embraced the challenge of guiding students in producing their projects for the exhibition, Jackson said. Teachers went the extra mile to make sure that their students’ high-quality work was displayed in an equally high-quality setting. “This allowed the teachers to use their creativity,” Jackson said. “There was an overwhelmingly positive response from the teachers,” Jackson added, “and the teachers and principals are already talking about the next exhibition!” Jackson and Butas are also already looking forward to the next exhibition on April 28, and until then, they will be busy making plans and meeting with the task force to discuss the successes and challenges of the inaugural exhibition. Although the first exhibition was considered an unequivocal success, Jackson and Butas do have one regret, Jackson said. “Our only regret is that we couldn’t go to all the schools to see their projects, because there was quality work in every one of them.”
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