Gerri Davis

Book Blurb #1

7/13/01

Hewitt, Geof (1995). A Portfolio Primer: Teaching, Collecting, and Assessing Student

Writing. Heinemann.

Geof Hewitt's A Portfolio Primer: Teaching, Collecting, and Assessing Student Writing was helpful in my quest to design and implement a portfolio-based assessment system, but I put the book down with a sense that I needed more specifics on the nuts and bolts of actually making it work.

I wanted to know specific details about how to organize a portfolio system?how to keep track of drafts and work, how often I should be expecting students to take a draft to completion. I was particularly disappointed that Hewitt didn't address how to incorporate portfolio-based assessment into a high school English setting, where teachers typically have anywhere from 150-200 students per semester.

Now for some of the things that were helpful: Hewitt gave a couple of good ideas for getting kids to write. "Intentionally Poor Writing," where the teacher asks her students to deliberately come up with the sappiest love poems or the most ridiculous stories, sounded like it would be a fun activity that would help kids get over the initial terror of being expected to create something fantastic. Another good idea was that of keeping a learning log. The learning log would be the place where students are expected to take notes on each day's class, to jot down their own thoughts and questions about the issues at hand, or whatever else they wanted to do in order to connect with the material (perhaps even draw!). Hewitt suggested that teachers give students the last three minutes of each class period in which to record final thoughts or questions, and at the end of the week, students would review their notebooks and synthesize what they had learned or not learned or were confused about. The idea of on-going self-reflection, done less formally and more frequently than just when students submit pieces to their portfolio, really appealed to me.

Another helpful hint that Hewitt spoke about was the possibility of keeping portfolios on computer disk if physical space limitations were an issue in moving toward a portfolio-based assessment system. I like the idea of having students keep a hard copy in the classroom and a disk copy, though.

I also liked the form of the Vermont Writing Assessment. Instead of assigning writing pieces numbers that evaluated how well students wrote in one of the five areas, the Vermont Assessment uses the words "Extensively," "Frequently," "Sometimes," and "Rarely." I feel that the use of these words is less of a value judgment of the child and more of an evaluation of the child's writing. The number system, which is what we use here in Oregon, of course, becomes an impediment to getting kids to understand why they scored a certain way because they have to decipher what the criteria for a "3" is. Kids inevitably walk away thinking simply, "I didn't pass," which doesn't improve their writing or their self-image.

This book was ultimately worthwhile reading; I guess that because I'm looking at just beginning a portfolio-based assessment system, I wanted something that would lay things out more clearly.