What is an Exhibition of Learning? Exhibitions at The Village School are one of our primary modes of assessment – but most importantly they are an opportunity for learners to share and celebrate their learning with their “village”.
In the education world, an Exhibition of Learning is described as a performance-based summative assessment – another way of describing anything that is not a multiple choice, standardized test. As a student, my culminating assessment experience was almost always such a test, and my guess is that your experience was similar.
There are decades of research that reveal the inadequacies of standardized, multiple choice tests. Most damaging are the studies that show that success on a standardized test predicts little to nothing about a person’s success in their life. Research and our own experience also reminds us that we can ace a test one week and forget all of the information we once “knew” the next. Education and brain science researchers will remind us that this is because these tests are good at measuring recall and surface level understanding, not deep learning.
On a larger scale, many colleges and universities have gone test-optional and companies like Google stopped requiring transcripts and test scores years ago. If colleges and companies are moving beyond these tests and the research proves their inadequacies, we should all be wondering why more schools aren’t changing their assessment practices. The fact that this assessment experience remains the status quo for the current generation should be appalling.
The word assessment is derived from the Latin root assidere, which means “to sit beside”. At the Village School our goal is to design assessments that are true to this definition. We believe in assessments for learning, not of learning. We believe in assessments that require learners to be “active protagonists” in their own experiences, not passive consumers. We believe in assessments that literally require us to “sit beside” each learner. Exhibitions of learning fulfill all of these goals.
A TVS Exhibition of Learning is an opportunity for our village of guides and families to sit beside learners and understand their experience in order to help them grow and help us design the kind of learning environment and experiences that will continue to help them thrive.
There are organizations dedicated to spreading the practice of exhibition-like assessments to schools and students all over the country. We are not alone in the effort to redefine assessments in schools – but we are ahead of the curve.
So, it is with great anticipation and excitement that we invite you to take a seat at our first Exhibition of Learning next week. How will you practice “sitting beside” your learner as they share their Session 1 journey with you? What questions will you ask them to help them reflect on their accomplishments and their future goals? What will listening to them share their learning reveal about them and who they are becoming? What will listening to them teach you about yourself?
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