Portfolios

One thing that I like when it comes to assignments is being able to have my own input. I don’t just want something that they teacher assigns and have to do just what they are expecting. That really doesn’t sound very interesting at all for me to create, much less for the teacher to read if they’ve assigned this same task in previous semesters. That’s why I’ve chosen to do this assignment through a blog, though the description was a journal and I was very happy to get the support of my professor to continue it this way.

This is also why I like the idea of a semester long portfolio for over all grades. These would be items that have been worked on all semester, and maybe revised once more before final submission, chosen by the student to represent his or her work as they see it.

I did my own first portfolio submission just last semester. It wasn’t quite as free as it could be, seeing as how we had 4 assignments during the semester and those were the pieces that would end up in the portfolio, but the individual assignments were a little looser with their expectations.

What I’m thinking of to assign my own students would be a little bit more free form than anything I’ve heard of yet. Rather than limiting them to the pieces they’ve written in my class, I’ll open them up to anything that they have written for any class in the last year. Meaning something that they wrote in their previous English courses, or any other class they’ve taken. The challenge though would be that they must revise anything that wasn’t written in the current semester.

I think that this would be a great way to allow students to see that writing across the curriculum does have something to do with each other and hopefully allow teachers to tie them together in a way that will also allow students to tie different aspects of the different styles of writing to come together. Once they see that, hopefully they will be able to put together on their own some sort of puzzle with different attributes of different styles of writing that will work best for the individual.