With the growth of the whole language approach to teaching, educators have paid considerable attention to portfolios, discovering that they can use them as teaching devices as well as for the more conventional evaluative purposes.
A recent edited collection on the topic, Portfolios in the Writing Classroom, is crammed with excellent suggestions about ways in which portfolios can be used. One of the most pertinent essays is Roberta Camp's report on Arts PROPEL, an experiment in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Rockefeller funding enabled supervisors for language arts and English in the Pittsburgh School District to work monthly with researchers from the Educational Testing Service and from Harvard University's Project Zero to discover effective means of offering writing opportunities to students with a broad range of abilities and backgrounds. The participants took to heart Brian Johnston's observation that in most schools teachers interrupt the learning cycle in writing just at the point where students stand the best chance of moving toward fruitful discoveries.
Using Johnston's admonition as their base, participants in Arts PROPEL began to explore means of encouraging students to work critically with their own writing. The team began with the assumption that it is essential to students' development as writers for them to look back on their own work and reflect upon it. Such questions as, “What do you like best about this piece?” or “What did you most hope your reader would remember?” or “Which of your writing skills are you least satisfied with in this piece?” help students begin to become critical readers.
These students also regularly participate in peer evaluation sessions in which they learn how other people answer questions about what they have written. They also respond in writing to other students' writing, thus providing their teachers with running records of their development as writers and critics of writing.
The teachers look at student papers but comment on them only in two ways: (1) they tell them what they have done well in the paper, and (2) they suggest one thing to focus on in their future writing. The basic critiquing of student writing comes from the students themselves, and this critiquing in itself becomes a writing exercise.
Students keep writing folders that contain everything pertaining to their writing—notes, rough drafts, critiques from others. From these folders they will, in time, select representative pieces for their portfolios. The first selection is of a piece the writer considers important. Specific questions guide the students to determine what makes the piece of writing they selected seem important to them, what seemed especially important to them as they were writing it, what they learned from working on the piece, what they would like to do if they continued to work on it, and what kinds of writing they would most like to do in the future.
For the second round of selections for the portfolios, students choose from their folders one piece they consider satisfactory and one they consider unsatisfactory. They reflect on what makes the satisfactory piece seem satisfactory and what makes the unsatisfactory piece less so. Again, they respond in writing.
Students continue to add to their writing portfolios during the year, being encouraged regularly to revise, refocus, and reconsider their writing. A piece is never considered finished. Writing is a process, and the process continues as long as one works on the writing. Students may decide to stop working on a given piece and move on to another one, but they are permitted to spend as much time as they want on anything they have in process.
The outcomes of Arts PROPEL are suggestive not only for students in writing classes but for students who write in any class. The methods these outcomes suggest are fully in the spirit of writing-across-the-curriculum and of the whole language approach.
