Academic Showcases in the Library

I'm always looking for ways to connect parents to our programming, and a common thing I hear from parents is that there don't seem to be as many volunteering opportunities in middle school as there are at the elementary level. The library is a great way to get in the door and meet other parents and get a feel for the rhythm of the school, whether a volunteer is there to help shelve or check in books, or to support the book fair or other special event.

I was also thinking about how many great things happen on our campus every day, and trying to figure out how to amplify that, so I came up with the Academic Showcase.

The idea was that classroom teachers would nominate students who did outstanding work on a regular class assignment, and then those students would get to share their class project with each other in the library. We'd invite parents to attend and offer some light snacks.

For example, we had some student writing from ELA, some Spanish ofrendas created for Dia de los Muertos,  and some science fair projects. Each student stood up and shared their work, everybody clapped, and it felt great to acknowledge students for going above and beyond on their class assignments.

We scheduled this at the end of a school day on a Friday, and invited other school staff, including administrators, to attend.

Here are a few tips and things I learned from the experience:

• Many classroom teachers didn't think their assignments were special or worthy enough to nominate students for - I really had to do a lot of education around this part to show them that it did not have to be a giant project to be part of the academic showcase. We did not get enough nominations to have a showcase the first quarter - I think teachers are still building procedures and it was too early in the year to make it happen.
  
• Some students had outstanding work, but were soft speakers - I needed to provide a microphone so they could be heard by everyone in the room.
• I had about 12 student participants for about an hour, including getting seated and having snacks. Each presenter was listed in order on a white board so it was clear, and all the presentations were linked to our interactive panel in advance.
• It would have been good to make time limits clear in advance, or to have a light signal that meant 30 seconds were remaining, because some students had very long writing pieces or shared lots and lots of details and it was hard to keep the audience's attention for longer than about 3 minutes.
• Our showcases were very well received - it was nice to invite families in to school for a positive reason and to recognize students who might not be in athletics or performing arts for their academic work.