Student Portfolio

Student Portfolio:
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Student Portfolio

Tips And Pointers:
Adopting portfolios as an assessment tool in your own classroom requires that you examine your instructional approach/philosophy. If lectures and textbooks drive your curriculum and tests are the typical way student learning is evaluated, constructivist ideology will challenge your instructional style. Teachers who have the most success using portfolios effectively engage students in project-based learning/curriculum. They anchor their instruction around meaningful tasks that require students to become deeply involved in solving problems, discussing issues with teachers and peers and working on large projects that span weeks of time.

Also, certain subjects appear to have a more natural fit with project-based learning; how can a mathematics teacher, for example, develop an authentic task to anchor student learning? That's why constructivists believe in curricular integration where subject areas are not divided into piecemeal. Instead, the real-world tasks require that subjects be fully integrated. That said, we all have to start somewhere.

Assignment

Given the courses you teach, create 2 activities or projects that evolve around real-world problems, will require students to seek out and explore the content, will necessitate discourse and discovery and last for a lengthy period of time. For example, in my web design course, students learn about designing web sites by working with local nonprofit groups who desire web sites, and our video production students collaborate with the screen writing film studies students.

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