CI5461: Week 5

When I was a high school student, I really loved being able to keep all of my assignments. Big essay? Of course I want it back with my instructors' comments! Storyboard project? Oh my gosh... please please please tell me how I did! Give me a grade! Spelling test? Put a sticker on that sucker and let me take it home to show Mom and Dad!

Despite the fact that this little snippet might make me look like a terrible perfectionist, it also shows what I think a lot of students feel they need: validation from others. Reading about portfolios this week made me think about their strengths as far as students' own assessment of themselves. With portfolios, they can see the progress they have made over time and can really focus on the things that they need work on as individuals. Wolf talks about how portfolios are reflective and how they show student growth over time and move students' work forward. Looking back on what they have done well gives students motivation to move their work to another level and it gives them a sense of what they could do better as well. I think they give students the flexibility they need to say, "Okay, I've done well on this. I can move on and focus on something else now."

I also like the idea from the Wolf article that "A portfolio is collaborative." Although individual students are able to think about their own work critically when they can see how it has changed over time, peers and teachers can do the same for these growing writers. It's easy for others to help you pick out patterns in your writing that could be feeding into a step forward or that could be holding the writer back from doing their best work. Also, feedback from others that is sprinkled throughout the portfolio is likely to reinforce students' views of their own work. Both different ideas and feedback that falls in line with students' own thinking about their work is valuable to a beginning writer.

Because I really like the idea of students having ownership of and accountability for their own work, my website resource for this week gives tips on how to write a self-assessment. It would probably need to be formatted a little differently and edited for high school students, but I still think it's helpful overall.