Chuck Schneekloth, Jr.

Book Report #1:

Portfolio Portraits

D. Graves and B. Sunstein

Implementing portfolios into my classroom is something I'm greatly interested in. Although this text provided me with much to reflect on, I'm still not certain how it can be done in the most effective, practical, and engaging way.

As a blanket statement, I embrace the idea for two specific reasons: it provides an "authentic" project for the kids to work toward, or at least a reason in which to write, and secondly, it sends the message to kids that their writing is valuable, and hence worthwhile to keep as documents to admire, evaluate, and reflect on later in time. This is good, as I believe kids will "buy into" such ideas when it feels real and tangible. This portfolio idea also will end my suffering from watching the following events take place: student asks if they "need this assignment" anymore, I say "it's for you," and they say, "OK" and quickly dispense of it in the garbage. It's always been so hard for me to watch students throw away writing that they've spent so much time on.

This book dwells on many facets of students' learning, most specifically portfolios as a way for students to learn more about themselves as writers, readers, learners, and reflective writers on their writing process. The latter is what I struggle with: how plausible is the idea to have sophomores reflect on their 'process?'

Essentially, the statement that a portfolio is "more theirs than mine" is perhaps the most poignant and important to remember. It seems as if freedom, trust, and flexibility are all needed for students to feel comfortable about taking risks and growing as writers in English class. Of course my fear is that there will be too much freedom and students will take advantage of it and 'beat the system,' but if effectively implemented this hopefully won't become an issue.

So how to effectively implement it? I liked the idea about months self-evaluations of one's pieces, freedom of what to read and write(but there must be some limit to this!), a reading list, five rough draft pages a week (or some specified number), the ideas of self evaluation and self-discovery, and including the following components: portfolio, working folder, reading log, reading list, self-evaluation sheet.

However, I also see this as a time for students to not just learn who they are as a reader or a writer, but what about just as a human being? Who ARE they really? Since this book claims that PERSONAL NARRATIVE IS THE MOST FAVORED PIECE OF WRITING, I've been thinking about a series of prompts in which they'd choose, say, eight out of twenty topics. I think freedom is good, but certain questions, certain NUDGES, have the capacity to take students to Vygotsky's zone of proximal development regarding their own vision, perception, and understanding of themselves. This is exciting to me!

Generally speaking, I just value the idea of looking back at anything in life, whether it's a relationship, event, or writing piece, and evaluating it so that one can learn something about it. "What can I learn from this artifact of the past?" seems to be the underlying statement of most of this book. Now it's just a matter of creating a structure that will allow them to learn as much as possible about themselves as students and human beings. As someone important once said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." This makes me realize what a good gateway activity this could be: let's talk about a life situation, and then reflect on it: what lessons can be learned? How have you become a better person from this experience? Well, the same goes for writing: looking back upon old pieces and even writing new ones, we realize things about ourselves we never thought about before. Case in point: I just thought of this final point spontaneously, only because my writing kept moving forward, and hence so did my process of discovery.