Portfolio Pedagogy

Two epiphanies refocused my portfolio practices: the first when I homeschooled my younger daughter in fourth grade and she prepared a portfolio for the school district’s review (in Pennsylvania), the second when I read Portfolio Pedagogy, edited by Kathleen Yancey, while I was getting my Ph.D. At these moments of insight, I realized that a portfolio could showcase much of what a person had learned because it showed what that person could do, that it was concrete evidence of learning in a way that a numerical average of grades could never be; and that once I used that portfolio as the final evidence of learning in a course, I could shape the whole course around helping students produce that—so that everything we did throughout the semester was directly tied to the outcomes shown concretely in the portfolio.

That second insight helped me practice “portfolio pedagogy.” The A-word—assessment—is not scary if one teaches to the assessment, right? But for “teaching to the test” to work well, one has to define the test in ways that measure what one wants to accomplish in the course. Start with the portfolio: what products should it contain to show that students have learned the things the teacher expects them to learn? Once those products have been identified, say, five pieces of writing of different types, we can design the assignments that lead students to the production of those portfolio pieces (e.g., the research assignment). We can determine what lessons need to be taught and what practice activities performed to prepare the students to produce those portfolio pieces. This analysis leads us to our schedule of readings, activities, and lessons.

This approach to designing a course from the final demonstration of student learning seems obvious, once one’s perspective has shifted, but before I really “got” this concept, I’d start planning a course with questions like, What book will I use? What readings will I assign from the book? When will it be convenient for me to receive a batch of papers from this class? And I didn’t necessarily sequence or build activities and assignments to reach a specific goal (students’ production of a particular paper).

Watching my daughter produce her first portfolio, though, showed me the importance of involving students in their own assessment. We had submitted a long list of learning objectives for each academic subject in order to receive permission to homeschool. Then, as Natalie prepared the portfolio with my guidance, we looked at each objective and considered what work she had done related to that objective, and what showed best that she had achieved the learning objective. Working on the portfolio enabled Natalie, even in fourth grade, to think about what she had learned and how to present her learning to others—much more cognitively demanding than taking a test that someone else designed and graded, much more informative than receiving a numerical score from the grader of a test. When the student takes stock of what he or she has learned, that step consolidates knowledge and enables the student to take the knowledge along to the next step of education as a foundation to build on—rather than to forget the “knowledge” because a test score is all that matters in the contract that public education makes with students.