Portfolio for Progressions

This is the 5th school year I’ve been having students work with online portfolios. With the help of my co-teaching partner Andelee Espinosa, I have been changing the model up a bit every year to have it make more sense with what what we’re looking for students to communicate in class and to the outside world.

This year, I’m working with a new curriculum aligned to Next Generation Science Standards. The unit design is focused on starting with an initial observation we are trying to understand. Throughout the course of the unit, students gain understandings that better help them describe what was occurring in that initial observation. This new unit framework has led me to rethink how we structure our content specific pages in our portfolio.

I used to have students separate content pages by overarching outcomes and provide artifacts demonstrating each. With the new unit design, I’m trying out having students create unit pages which track the course of their work in that unit. The unit pages contain lab work, quiz reflections (takeaways for Pear Deck quizzes), and redefining of models, and their assessment. The ultimate goal for this page is for it to show a progression of learning and reflection on that learning. Below you’ll see a couple of student examples, feel free to click on the images to see their work in the first unit of the year.

Please note: these portfolios are incomplete as they are only about 5 weeks old and are still very much a work in progress. But I really wanted to share the work of my students.

In addition, we have a specific page for Habits of Mind. In our class, we are attempting to emphasize problem solving skills through a variety of different experiences. As a part of these activities, we want students to think beyond the endpoint of what content knowledge they gained. We want them to start thinking about the skills that are required to be an effective problem solver. So we have them reflect specifically on a couple of Habits of Mind, as outlined by Bena Kallick and Arthur Costa, at the end of some of our instant and maker challenges.

This new look portfolio is a work in progress and has required us to visit it multiple times per week to keep up with it. I’ve realized how much of a routine it needs to be in order to be effective as a learning document. When I used it for a showcase, it made sense we wouldn’t visit it regularly. As it is a reflection tool, it makes sense that we are visiting it more regularly. Still, though, I’m trying to think of the best way to use this space effectively to help students build connections between the activities we do and the content they are learning. So, I still see that things may be changed up next unit, too.

Based on feedback from students after the first unit, I think there are a couple of things I’ll be changing up. The big thing is the reflections next to each lab. Right now the reflections next to the lab focus on practice options chosen by the student related to that topic (practice problems, watching videos, doing simulations, guided practice, or games like Gimkit). Students didn’t feel like this was beneficial. So, I plan on making this space for students to reflect on how this lab connects to the bigger ideas in the unit.

I polled my students the other day and learned that less than 20% had made a digital portfolio as part of a previous class. In addition, less than ⅓ of them had ever created a web site. I am so happy that Google Sites is so user friendly in the ability to create really clean and beautiful looking sites for learners.

If you’re looking to start somewhere, why not just have students put together a passion page where they insert YouTube clips that connect to their lives and explain that connection to a general audience. It’s the number one way I get to know about my students on day one of my course.