Portfolios and Public Defenses of Student Work

• In Event: If Not Standardized Testing, Then What?

Abstract

This paper focuses on the defense of portfolios before a panel of evaluators as a summative assessment of student work, focusing on the work of a particular K-8 school we will call “Jefferson School,” for the sake of anonymity. Middle school students at Jefferson School have three years to compile their portfolios in six disciplines: literature, mathematics, humanities, art, science, and “beyond the classroom,” which is focused on an interest the student pursues outside of school (though Jefferson eliminated the “beyond the classroom” portfolio after the study that is the focus of this paper took place). At various points throughout their seventh- and eighth-grade years, students present their work in each of these portfolio subjects (usually two at a time) to a committee (composed of the student’s advisor, the subject teacher(s), a sixth-grade helper, a community member, and family members) that uses a rubric based on five Habits of Mind (evidence, connections, conjecture, relevance, and perspective) to guide a collective assessment of the students’ presentation and work.
Following the presentation, the student responds to any questions the committee members may have before leaving the room so the committee members may can discuss their observations, lingering questions, doubts, and so forth, all while consulting the subject rubric and listening to any additional information about the student’s work the subject teacher might find pertinent to add. Once the committee has come to consensus on whether or not the student passed with or without revisions, the student is called back into the room and the committee explains the reasoning behind the assessment. Students have an opportunity to revise work if they did not pass the first time, but eighth graders must receive a passing evaluation in all six (now five) portfolios in order to graduate.
Instead of receiving a single score intended to sum up some arbitrarily benchmarked level of achievement, students who do not pass all criteria in a given subject are required to revise some or all of their work, which then is reevaluated by the committee, only deepening the learning.
This paper is based on interviews the presenter conducted with fifteen Jefferson alumni to find out what, if anything, they remembered about the process, specifically, if they felt it had influenced their decisions and ability to navigate as they went on through higher levels of education and work. All the participants remembered their experience (mostly the emotional impact, e.g., feeling nervous, worried, overwhelmed, disappointed, or proud), and many of them were able to articulate how it had influenced them after leaving the school. Alumni raised a range of specific examples: several mentioned that presenting six portfolios before a committee of adults had made them confident public speakers; others spoke about how high school felt easy afterward because nothing compared to the intensity of the portfolio process; still others mentioned that they learned how to manage their time and organize their work. The presenter makes the argument that the preparation for and defense of portfolios as described here was a powerful experience for the students involved.

Author

• Emily R. Gasoi, Artful Education