Putting on a Show: The Third Week of Fourth Grade
To be an elementary school parent is to know this: There will be shows. At my son’s old school, there were holiday shows: our kindergartener in a sea of red-and-white-clad kindergarteners looking hesitantly to the audience as they sang over each other in broken unison to a crackly recording of “Jingle Bell Rock.” There were dances: our first-grader gyrating and pulsing in a crowd of one hundred first graders to the sound of “La Gente.” There were skits: our third-grader playing Matilda in a highly condensed version of the Roald Dahl play. If you are an elementary school parent, you know there will be performances and you, as a supportive parent, will sit in the audience, craning your neck, straining to understand what is going on, and proudly training your iPhone camera on your child amid the crowd.
“Welcome to the first recital of the year.”
At his new school, the performance is arriving much earlier than the holidays (it is week three of the year), and to much less fanfare. A dozen parents sit in blue plastic chairs set in tidy rows. Sixteen fourth- and fifth-graders, swinging their legs and fidgeting, stand about on the linoleum in front of us.
Seated at front, one of those fifth-graders is MC’ing the event. “Our first performance will be,” she reviews her notes and introduces a pair of girls who, she explains, “will sing the plastic cup song.”
Two girls come forward and drum out percussion with a plastic cup while singing softly. After the two-minute performance, parents and children wave jazz hands in the air in a show of silent appreciation.
“Thank you for that great performance,” the fifth-grader nods to her classmates.
This is recital day at my son’s new school. In fact, every other Friday, 20 Fridays through the year, it is recital day. Performances, when done this way, take on a whole new meaning. They are not a flow of parents in an auditorium, but rather a chance for student voice, student self-expression.
“Our next performance will be,” our MC reviews the names on the dry erase board, crosses one out, checks off her clipboard, and introduces a boy “reading a poem he wrote for his mother.”
The boy stands and walks to the center with a sheet of loose-leaf paper in hand and speaks, at first softly, then more loudly. “Mom, you are always there for me. You nurture me. You take care of me…”
Jazz hands.
There is fairly good evidence that performances can be a powerful force for growth by giving both relevance and multisensory connection to learning. Think back to what was on the test you handed a teacher in ninth grade, and you’ll have to rack your brain. But think back to what went into the musical you worked on for a big opening night, and you can picture every moment of it.
But how do schools use performances?
At my son’s old school, they were memorable (if messy) spectacles that punctuated the school year. But at times I was frustrated by the nagging feeling that they could have been so much more than that. When the kids danced to La Gente, my son couldn’t come up with any reason why. When he played Matilda, it wasn’t because the class was reading and discussing Matilda but rather because it seemed like a good play to perform. Last year, when President Trump made anti-immigrant xenophobia great again, students took to the stage to read biographical pieces about Frida Kahlo and Roberto Clemente and Simon Bolivar. Finally, I thought at the time, a performance that was the culmination of deeper learning, not just a show! But when I asked my son what they had been learning leading up to these performances, he explained that they had been handed the pages to rehearse a few days before.
This is the risk: Although learning, without a performance, may be easily forgotten, performance without learning is, well, just a show. It’s enjoyable and memorable — we parents love it — but it’s not deepening learning. One of the best performance-based learning classes I have ever seen was taught by a teacher who is now excelling as a principal. All of his students had once been struggling and behind in high school, most had previously failed the state’s Regents exams. Now, in his US history class, the entire curriculum consisted of acting out famous Supreme Court cases, with students taking on new roles every two weeks as judges and lawyers arguing the cases they were reading about. The students were engaged as they had never been before. And they deeply remembered what they were learning. Every one of them passed the US History Regents.
“Next,” the fifth-grade MC moves down the list to introduce a set of one boy and four girls, including herself, who will be “performing a play we wrote ourselves.” She stands up and gets into character, throwing on a backpack and setting up the wooden blocks into a stack before the play began.
What do students perform at his new school? Something. Anything. Whatever they want. It is up to them. I had not realized it until arriving, but performance-based learning here starts from cultivating the skill, the possibility, of student voice. And to find one’s voice in a constructive way is indeed a skill. Here’s another fact from cognitive psychologists: It takes at least 20 repetitions to form a habit. It will take my son one year to form the habit of turning ideas into a recital.
“Our next performance will be,” and now the fifth-grade MC introduces my son partnered with another boy. The pair had batted around many ideas for their first recital. A puppet show. A play. A “sassy unicorn” (I’m not sure).
“They will be performing a magic show.”
In the end, they had decided on a magic show. My son had concocted the idea of disappearing into one of the large moving boxes still hanging around the house and reappearing in another. I faithfully cut out a pair of holes in the two boxes, and carried them on the subway to school. Along the way, a supportive but skeptical father, I wondered aloud to my son whether performing something you have never done before was the best idea. I reminded him that most magicians only perform a trick they’ve tried out at least twice.
At the performance, he and his friend flub the magic entirely. My son sets himself in the box, falls onto his side to audience chuckles as his friend tries to turn the box over, then gets a quiet if unintended laugh out of us as we see him crawling out on his belly through the back of the box.
But he and his friend take it in stride.
We smile, give our jazz hands. And the fifth-grade MC thanks them for their performance.
Not every performance is a tour de force. And that’s part of performance-based learning, too, knowing what it is to soldier on. You remember because you want to get it right when you’re in front of a big audience.
“What did you learn,” I ask him.
“Next time I’m going to practice more first.”
“Practice,” I nod. “Not a bad thing to learn.”
He agrees.
This is part of what I love about the environment at this school: it generates not the pressure to perform, but to invent, and the possibility to shine. And then, when you don’t shine, to think about how you will pick yourself up, polish yourself off, and shine next time. And, along the way, to actually learn the lessons that would have never stuck with you if, say, your father just told them to you.