Expression

Expression is a time when students propose their own project inspired by the arc topic and use time everyday to work on that project. Our Elementary bands often propose a group project based on their shared passions while Middle and High School bands propose individual and small group projects.

In Expression, students build on and integrate what they learned in Exploration by creating, experimenting, researching, or performing (or some other mode of creation) around the facet of the arc topic has caught their intellectual interest. Often this begins with a question or an idea that has sparked their interest during the Exploration phase. 

Collaborators and experts support students in project management, documentation, perseverance, collaboration, and specific skills to complete their project. While students define the terms on which their project will succeed, failures along the way are explicitly expected and encouraged.

Declaration

Movie makers and marketing teams pitch ideas. Researchers and nonprofits write grant proposals.  Our students write declarations!  

A declaration is a clear statement of intent, written, researched, and illustrated, to the best of their abilities, by the students. A declaration usually includes a pitch, a calendar, a budget, resources/experts that the student will reference and how success will be measured with skill, production, and learning goal rubrics that get incorporated into student assessments for later reflection and evaluation.  Students pitch their ideas to a panel of peers, collaborators and admin. Feedback from this process helps them hone their idea to something both challenging and doable!

Project Management

Expression phase is all about cultivating the skills of project management: how to work as a team, break down a big goal into discrete tasks, track/prioritize those tasks, adapt and pivot, give and receive feedback, iterate and fail forward.  We establish routines and directly teach the skills that will help students be successful in their chosen path.

The routines that structure expression phase include: having a daily practice of goal setting and journaling, tracking tasks on a “to-do, in-process, done” board and creating deadlines for feedback and iteration.  Bands play team building games as a way of creating a shared vocabulary for what effective collaboration and communication looks like. Through mini lessons kids explicitly learn problem solving skills, how to give effective feedback and how to make contact with adult experts in the world. 

Portfolio

In a school without tests and letter grades, how do we show evidence of students’ growth and learning? Simply by looking at the work itself! Portfolios are a great way to both showcase finished work and reveal the process behind its creation. During Expression keeping a daily or weekly documentation practice is important to help students reflect on their process and build out their portfolio. A reflection usually includes an assessment of the goals they set in their declaration, photo/drawn evidence of progress and final product, and a reflection on their work habits. As kids mature, we encourage them to deepen their reflection. This documentation, along with the declaration and final project, makes up a process portfolio that gets displayed at Exposition.