Portfolios Revisited

Debbie Willingham
Oct 24, 2011

How can student portfolios support ongoing growth and mastery using LEARNING-FOCUSED strategies and principles?

For the past ten years, portfolios have been suggested and discussed as good ways to have students show what they have learned. They should help students realize that the assessment of their ongoing work is not just a grade; rather, they should be learning from what we say about their work. Portfolios should help students set goals, and reach and modify them through the year. They should reflect students' good work and successes throughout the year, and they should show the year's academic growth as the year progresses. They are a perfect place to collect extending thinking and culminating assignments, projects, and write-ups.

However, portfolios often just become a holding place for student work to accumulate, without being used again after it is graded and placed in the folder, pizza box, or drawer. Students often see their returned graded papers as "finished business" even though you may have labored over them for hours. For students, the reason for completing work is too often only to get a grade. Typically, you are usually the only audience and evaluator of student work, rather than students having the opportunity to share it (whether finished or otherwise) with peers or parents.
To create a living portfolio, students need to collect, select, reflect, and project their ideas through their work. To get started with portfolios, think about how many and what types of assignments you want students to put in their portfolios. Items in the portfolio may include writing assignments in subject areas. Examples include science lab write-ups with reflections or a summary of what students have learned in a math unit as they answer their unit essential question, describe how they learned the process, and list ways they will remember steps in the process. Assignments for portfolios may include creative Extending Thinking writing assignments such as RAFTs, newspaper front pages in history, new endings to stories, or "what if" scenarios. Portfolios easily allow you to differentiate student assignments, either by student choice or by your choice according to student readiness. The portfolio is meant to be an individual, personalized collection of a student's progress and mastery through the year.

Think about how you want the portfolios to be used throughout the school year. How might you use them as the basis for student peer teaching, editing, and critiquing, or as the basis for conferences with parents? Portfolios may also provide the basis for self-reflections or ongoing review by students at strategic points during the year.

Portfolios can be an easy, organized way to have students continually reflect on and share their growth. They do not have to be time-consuming for teachers or huge, overwhelming projects for students. They are a natural way to collect student work through the year as long as they are, like any good organizer, used again in a meaningful way!