Assessing and Evaluating Student Learning-

Pro Portfolio

My goal for my classroom is to instill a growth mindset. Literature/writing can pose a lot of challenges for students. Connecting concepts, sentence structure, grammar, and understanding themes are a few examples. My hope is to create assignments that allow for multiple drafting/editing periods. I would hope to take away the pressure of having to get it right in just a few days of examples. Practice makes perfect and all that. While there are a lot of ways to evaluate student learning, I personally favor the portfolio. To me, this gives students the chance to show improvement, get creative and "show off".

For example, if I do a unit on writing research papers here would be the rough timeline and how they can add it to a portfolio:
1. Practice brainstorming with bubbles maps or lists. Give students a topic and come up with branches off the bubble. Then, allow students to write down their own topic and add branches.
2. Show examples of research paper construction that are high quality and ones that need work and how to correct them
3. Allow for research days and how to find credible sources
4. Draft their first paper
5. Peer editing/me editing
6. Chance to make changes before final paper.

I would have them start small-a few pages and grow from there. On my end, if I have them put in their first draft with edit suggestions and then their final essay, it would be easy to see the changes they made, where they improved and if they took suggestion well. This progress would be shown with any essay that we do.

I like the idea of having a journal section, chance to respond to articles and chosen stories and maybe a free reading tracker where they can earn bonuses for reading for fun. I had a teacher in middle school that had required portfolio elements (tests, papers, reflections) and then allowed us to add what we wanted in certain categories. For example, we had to either reflect on a poem we really liked or write one based off of the criteria we learned about certain types of poetry. Another optional entry was writing a short story based on what we learned about short story criteria.

To me, the portfolio allows students to stay organized and get creative. It also allows me to note progress and watch for areas where they may still struggle. This also shows performance vs regurgitation. It is easy to name characters and settings, but more challenging to analyze and express new ideas about the story. By requiring portfolio elements that emphasize mastery, analysis, and demonstrating contextual ideas, then I am moving beyond simple who, what, when, where, why questions.