From a Portfolio Classroom to a Portfolio School

What if a high school could track its learners' growth over the course of four years? 

What if high school students could track their own learning over the course of four years?

These were the two essential questions that set me on my journey--first as a classroom teacher, and now as a principal--towards a portfolio-driven school. 

I have written and shared publicly about my own portfolio classroom, which was first paper-driven, eight years ago, and now entirely digital, with the advent of various learning management systems (most recently, Haiku/Powerschool). 

I'm writing now as a principal working towards a portfolio-driven school, first wondering about and now rolling towards school-wide implementation.

In what follows, I share my thoughts on the what, the why, and the how of school-wide portfolio keeping. Along the way, I'll share the benefits  of teaching the process of thinking and learning, of metacognition; I'll also share why I think any school in the 21st Century could and should keep such portfolios, and with minimal teacher and student effort. 

First, What is a Portfolio? What is a Portfolio-Driven School?

• As others have outlined, a student portfolio is, at its very base an archive of student work, with the potential to be both a workspace, and ultimately, a showcase of student learning.

• A portfolio-driven school first acknowledges that student learning is essentially a shared, multi-year, and collaborative process. Our teaching does not happen in isolation--it is built on and builds towards past and future curricula. Likewise, our students don't appear and disappear in a vacuum; each student carries along with him or her a long history of ongoing challenges and successes, goals and frustrations. 

• A school-wide portfolio model, therefore, is a record of each student's history, and a site of student reflection, self-assessment, and goal-setting in relation to various media artifacts, each of which is anchored in but transcends a particular class, year, or academic subject.

Second, Why Should We Build Portfolio Schools? 

• As Matt Renwick has shown in his excellent and very recent book, Digital Portfolios in the Classroom (ASCD, 2017), there are at least 10 reasons that "make the case" for digital student portfolios, as such portfolios allow students, teachers, and school communities to:
1. Celebrate all students as learners
2. Improve home-school communication
3. Facilitate better feedback
4. Highlight the process of learning
5. Demonstrate progress over time
6. Guide students to become self-directed learners
7. Maximize formative assessment
8. Integrate speaking and listening
9. Advocate for every student
10. Work smarter as a teacher

• Portfolio keeping is driven by cycles of reflection, self-assessment, and goal-setting, all of which are firmly metacognitive skills. Metacognition, or teaching learners to "drive their brains" and master their own habits of learning, is trending now in educational circles, and for good reason: The research in education justifies it, and Common Core teaching and learning standards have shifted towards teaching thinking practices within each discipline. As an illustration, Wilson and Conyers, in their 2016 book Teaching Students to Drive Their Brains, cite a meta-analysis of 91 studies that determined metacognition as "the number one shared characteristic of high academic achievers."

Third, How Might We Build Portfolio Schools?

• In its most basic form, school-wide portfolio keeping, in the 21st Century is simple. When all work is already digital or easily captured in digital form, portfolio keeping demands very little of teachers and students, and it offers an impressive return on even the slightest investment.

• To revisit the How of digital student portfolios in terms of the What, then:

• If a portfolio is an archive, or storehouse of student work, then it can take the simplest form: a google drive folder. Anything can remain in such a folder, and such a folder can travel with a student for the four years of high school.

• If a portfolio becomes an opportunity for reflection, self-assessment, and goal setting, then a number of apps and activities might interface with the student work, including:
• annotation, attaching cover letters (possible in Google Apps for Edu)
• student and teacher commenting (possible in the SeeSaw app and Haiku's ePortfolio feature)
• publishing and showcasing (possible in a number of digital apps and physical media)

• Finally, when determining the How, teachers will want to think about the role of the portfolio for their classes:
• Do they want the artifacts to be selected by student or teacher?
• Do they want the portfolio to reflect process (challenges, early drafts, even failures) or performance (trophy pieces, final drafts)?

Next Steps

• Faculty Training and Expectations

• At our faculty meeting and training in the theory and practice of digital student portfolios, we stressed the metacognitive theory and easy entry for rolling this out for our students. We also emphasized that this is, at its core, a student-driven initiative, and so the bulk of portfolio keeping will rely on student submissions and student portfolio keeping.
• We clarified expectations of teachers for the next semester. As a baseline across all classes, we asked that each teacher design three activities for their classes: goal setting; submission of a process artifact (with student comments or annotations); submission of a performance artifact (with student comments or annotations).
• We explored the what, the why, and the how of digital portfolios for our own school with teacher metacognition activities, exploratory gallery walks, table-talk conferences, teacher reflections, and department meetings for lesson design. 
• We trained faculty in use of the SeeSaw app as the platform for hosting each student's portfolio. In our training, each teacher became a "student" in a faculty "class" and experienced three "assignments," including a submission of an image to the "journal," a response to some questions, and the completion of an exit ticket. 

• Remaining Steps and Questions

• We arrived at SeeSaw through a process of elimination, as it seemed to be the simplest, most dynamic, and most accessible option. We haven't decided yet, however, if it is the absolute best option and fit for our school. It simply seemed that the learning curve, upkeep, and oversight of student portfolios, via SeeSaw, were optimal for our needs.
• In fact, our Director of Educational Technology, R. Aaron Fleksher, had determined Haiku's ePortfolio feature to be too difficult to access by the classroom teacher in a meaningful way, and we had determined that individual Google Folders were both not dynamic enough and too difficult to manage with sharing across the school and over the years.
• In our exit tickets from the day, faculty asked for more guidance with setting up their classrooms on SeeSaw. One day of training was sufficient for the theory of metacognition and portfolios, and the practice of SeeSaw as a student, but it wasn't sufficient for generating lessons and materials for rolling out a portfolio classroom on SeeSaw.
• Particular departments and teachers have requested further training and follow-up for both implementation and modeling, and especially those departments in which writing is secondary to performance (e.g. the Math department would like to learn more about the use of Math portfolios--an expected challenge, given the typical association of the Humanities with portfolios).