Why Assign Portfolios?

“The value of creating portfolios is in the thinking it asks of both students and teachers…Portfolios give students the wide angle and the zoom lens by which to view and present themselves as learners, thinkers, and writers. In the process of creating portfolios, they spread out their writing, analyze and revise it, present it encased in more writing that explains how it came to be and what its special strengths are. In other words, students engage in activities that promote learning while becoming more perceptive about that learning.” (Mary Ann Smith, Teachers’ Voices: Portfolios in the Classroom)

Portfolios have different purposes

For showing off the best

Demonstrating progress

Presenting the drafts and decisions that go into a piece of writing

Assembling the reach of writers’ learning

Portfolios also have audiences: teachers, students, parents, other teachers, administrators, neighbors, student-selected “outsiders”

Portfolios involve process

Portfolios extend the time devoted to writing and its many stages, as teachers invite students to return over and over again to what they have written, to re-see and review and recall their thinking along the way.

Portfolios can help students examine the processes that work best for them and examine the changing nature of those processes.

Portfolios shift more authority to the student

When students take charge of their portfolios, they make and justify their portfolio choices and come to terms with the quality of those choices.

They look to themselves rather than always to the teacher, for judgments about their strengths and limitations as writers.

Portfolios mark the growth of students

Students can learn to articulate which writing strategies they have added to their repertoires and can call on these strategies when they sit down to write.

Students ask themselves tough questions: Which pieces of writing best represent me as a writer? What do I mean by good writing? How will I present these writings to my readers? What was difficult or irritating or easy about this writing? What have I learned about writing and the process I use to write?

Lani Uyeno, Portfolio Workshop, 10.30.01

From Peter Elbow

“Portfolios give a better picture of students’ writing abilities. Most writing assignments--even those that use actual writing samples produced in response to carefully tested prompts and that are graded by sophisticated holistic scoring--look at only one piece of writing in one genre done on one particular day. We all sense (and research backs it up; see, for example, Cooper, The Nature and Measurement of Competency in English) that we cannot trust the picture of someone’s writing that emerges unless we see what he or she can do on various occasions on various pieces. And if we want to know about a student’s general or overall writing ability, rather than just her skill in narrative or argument, we need to see her writing in various genres.”