Portfolios are used in many professions; the arts and sales being only two. Typically in schools they are used to house students' work, whether it be exemplary or common work. Portfolios serve as a catalyst for student growth and authentic assessment in language arts. However they can only be an instrument of growth if students can easily locate the portfolio and the important work it contains. An on-going frustration for me as a middle school teacher were students who had "lost" their portfolios. And given the electronic age of writing, that often meant that their files were buried in several locations on one or more computers. I have created an Inspiration Writing Portfolio for students to electronically compile and store their work throughout the year. Download the portfolio from Inspired Learning Community and watch a brief video demonstration on Teacher Tube. Say "good-bye" to frustration and "hello" to organization!
Click on the link below to view the Writing Portfolios video!
http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=610ce0f3de8944c37f38
Two things are important to me here. First, Priya wants to substantively affect her fellow students' work. She wants to heighten the stakes in their dialogue to their mutual benefit. And secondly, Priya reveals that because together they are faced with responding to an essay assignment, ( Online high schools ) students share an understanding of their writing situation that teachers do not. For me, this means creating meaningful opportunities for students to work with each other, and creating an environment in which they are motivated to produce for one another. Whereas I have always had students look at one another's first drafts, I now ask them to work with each other at the problem-definition stage, and I ask them to read and respond critically to one another's revised essays. Students find this last step particularly illuminating because ( Online High School Diploma ) they follow one other person's work from inception to completion, playing an active-respectfully and critically responsive-role throughout. No amount of general talk and examples from outside the class on my part could approach the gains they report in their reflective essays.
In my writing links, I ask all students to turn in portfolios of six to twelve pieces they have written over the quarter. They organize their portfolios with an introductory essay that provides their rationale for selecting those pieces to represent their thinking, learning and writing in the course. I turned to this method of assessment in my writing courses ( online arts degree ) when I discovered the power of students' own insights into their writing. Students began to become reflective about their writing when I asked them to think about the disciplinary assumptions that shape the thinking, hence the writing about an issue in the linked course. In addition, their responses to self-assessment questions for individual essays often generated insights into issues-what we typically call "problems"-in their writing that provided us a meaningful basis for productive conversations about writing. I recognized the potential for learning ( online social service degree ) in the reflections students articulated in these individual exercises about specific pieces, and I began to consider what we might gain from reflecting on the writing they had done in the course as a whole.
In asking students to create portfolios organized by reflective essays, I hoped to gain the opportunity to see inside their thinking, to learn how they think about writing and learning, how they see themselves as participants in the writing/thinking process in general and in a disciplinary discourse in particular, and how these perceptions develop or change over the course ( online degree in law ) of the quarter. These meta-issues ground and inform what students write, but they often remain invisible because they are not consciously addressed by students in their writing. By asking students to make their understandings conscious and explicit, I hoped to gain insights into the way students learn in interaction with my pedagogy, and to make those insights available to both them and me as learners.