"I have gone from reading tiny 40-page books to reading 300-page books very rapidly. I like books with big and neat words so I can transfer those words to my own writing. I've changed as a writer in the area of word choice. I use high-tech and just plain fun words."
--John Wagner, fifth-grader
Harborview Elementary School
JUNEAU, ALASKA -- Shirley Campbell pulls a bright-yellow three-ring folder from a collection of identical yellow folders stashed in crates on the counter.
"Who knows what this is?" the teacher asks her mixed-age class of third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders.
"It's a portfolio," James pipes up.
"What's it for?" Campbell asks.
"It shows our progress," James volunteers.
"Who's your audience? Who looks at it?"
Answers pop up around the room: "Teachers." "Parents." "Yourself."
"What does it mean to self-reflect?" the teacher asks.
"Kind of looking back," Rachel answers.
"What are you looking back at?" Campbell probes.
Students call out: "What you did, what you thought." "What you learned." "What you accomplished."
"Would you reflect on what you could learn to do better?" the teacher asks.
"Yes!" a chorus of voices responds.
The teacher explains their assignment: to write letters to themselves about their growth and progress as readers and writers. What do they most like to read? What discoveries have they made about their reading and writing? How have they changed? What is easy? What is hard? How could they do better?
The kids spread out with their paper and pencils, plopping into beanbag chairs, sprawling across the floor, propping elbows on worktables. Jacob writes that he likes sports stories, fantasies, and mysteries, and that he's getting "pretty good" at spelling six-letter words. Atlin says he can read "fluently" now, though he was "struggling" in fourth grade. Frankie liked Dead Man in Indian Creek and Escape from Warsaw. Rachel favors characters with "lively personalities." Sam explains that reading is "very important" for tasks such as ordering "camping stuff" from magazines and landing jobs. "If you don't know how to read, you're out of luck," Sam observes. "But if you know how to read, you have a way better chance of getting the job."
It's no coincidence that this Harborview Elementary School classroom, where children reflect on their own learning and store those reflections in portfolios, is bursting with books. Shelf after shelf is crammed with fantasies and animal stories, mysteries and adventure stories, science books and dictionaries. As children finish their letters, they retire to corners and crannies cradling volumes such as The Five Chinese Brothers, The Ghostmobile, and Thunder at Gettysburg. The quiet is broken only by questions from students who are still writing. "How do you spell elongate?" asks John.
The room's abundant books reflect the Juneau Borough School District's switch to whole-language literacy instruction about eight years ago. Portfolios followed quickly behind, like the wake of a freighter plying Southeast Alaska's Gastineau Channel. Seeing a glaring mismatch between whole-language instruction and standardized assessment, the district's first-grade teachers began to look for a better fit between teaching and testing, says Bernie Sorenson, who coordinates grants and assessments for the district. A groundswell of dissatisfaction with traditional report cards, along with a growing discontent with the Iowa Test of Basic Skills as the district's main measure of student progress, launched the district on an eight-year odyssey to design and use portfolios in language arts assessment.
Today, every first- through fifth-grade teacher in the district's five elementary schools is required to compile—with student input—a language arts portfolio for each child in her classroom. Portfolio content must follow district guidelines. (See Juneau Language Arts Portfolio for a list of required elements.) But eight years ago when portfolios surfaced in Juneau, the waters of alternative assessment were largely uncharted. "We've been sort of the entrepreneurs of portfolio assessment," says Sorenson. "It began with our primary teachers looking at standardized tests and saying, 'Is this developmentally appropriate? Isn't there another way?'"
"I have changed in my ability to stop at periods, pause at commas, and understand the books better. What makes a good book for me is humor. I discovered that I can ignore people because I am so in the book. I have changed as a writer in my building suspense and my longer stories."
--Erin Cottingham, fourth-grader
Harborview Elementary School
arborview Elementary School sits in the shadow of Mount Juneau, a muscular peak rising abruptly from the waterfront. Wedged between the icy waters of Gastineau Channel and the snow-crested cliffs of Southeast Alaska's coast range, Juneau has the scent of wildness. The spirits of bald eagles and brown bears, killer whales and king salmon—the wild things that inspired the arts and legends of the native Tlingit people—inhabit all the stirrings of the forest, undulations of the ocean, and scudding of the clouds.
The toughness and independence of Juneau's inhabitants are reflected in its schools. Grass-roots innovations are popular. Top-down mandates are not.
"It's the Alaskan spirit," says Mary Tonkovich, a reading and home-schooling specialist with the district office. "Nobody tells us what to do. Our staff is the wild, raging river, not the stagnant pond."
Says Sorenson: "The people in this district are highly professional. Every article that comes out, they're sharing with everybody, they're reading, investigating, questioning. Pretty soon, this little swell gets started and they say, 'Let's go for it.'"
With grant money from the state education department, a group of Juneau first-grade teachers, a reading specialist, and the district curriculum director journeyed to Anchorage in 1989. There, they took workshops on portfolio assessment sponsored by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. They wanted an alternative to standardized testing—the cookie-cutter method that too often fails to accurately measure what students know and can do. Portfolios, potentially rich with detail and packed with individualized information on each child, seemed to mesh with the district's new-found emphasis on literature-based literacy instruction, to which children bring their own meaning and experience.
The group's early enthusiasm flagged, says Tonkovich, as they began to slog through the task of designing a workable, meaningful system. The questions were many: What was the purpose of the portfolios? How should they be scored? How do they fit into the instructional mix? Where do they belong in the big picture of district, state, and national reform? What items should they contain? Who should select the contents? Who was the primary audience?
Answers were elusive. Portfolios were new on the school reform scene, and the district stumbled along, borrowing from the few models that existed and inventing the rest, says Tonkovich.
"What we have now is nothing like what we started with," she recounts. "We had focus groups of teachers, and they'd try things out and say, 'No, this doesn't work, or this is great.' The first couple of years, I had cardboard boxes filled with things from other places."
The teachers struggled to design instruments to chart student growth. They dipped into the research and sifted through their own experience, looking for benchmarks of progress in reading and writing.
They found what they were looking for: clues to better assessment. But, like fishers who unexpectedly find king salmon among the rockfish in their net, the Juneau group landed a bonus: clues to better teaching. As one result of their search, they developed two continuums—one for reading, one for writing—where teachers could chart the development of primary students.
The continuums pinpoint the skills, comprehension, and attitudes students exhibit at five levels of proficiency: emergent, beginning, developing, expanding, and independent. An emergent reader, for example, relies on memory for reading, focuses on pictures rather than print for meaning, understands how books work (reading from top to bottom, front to back), and shows curiosity about print in her environment, among other things. On the other end of the continuum, an independent reader reads books with long descriptions and challenging vocabulary, remembers the sequence of events, connects experiences with reading, corrects herself automatically, confidently reads a story with appropriate expression, reads silently for extended periods of time, and recommends books to others.
More than just charting student performance, the continuums also offer guideposts for teaching.
"They provide the best training for teachers," Tonkovich says. "In developing and using the continuums, some good teachers have become very excellent teachers by really thinking about the processes of learning to read and write."
Adds Bernie Sorenson: "It's so key that teachers know the targets—for example, what does a good reader look like? Then their daily practice can mirror those targets in order to get those kids to those levels."
Ultimately, the continuums gave Juneau's teachers the elusive link between curriculum and assessment. "People say, 'Well sure, it's intuitively obvious that you tie the curriculum and the assessment together,' but that isn't the way it works in real life," Tonkovich notes. "The continuums just brought that together so much for so many of our teachers."
Sorenson describes the primary teachers' early struggles to design the continuums. "There was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears—observing kids, writing it up, coming back to each other and saying, 'Is this what we're observing as an emergent reader and writer?' These people gained an incredible ownership of the process. They grew. They were observing, trying to figure this continuum out. All of this was changing practice."
Still, using the continuums consistently across schools and classrooms proved problematic. Teachers found, for example, that they sometimes placed students at very different points along the scale. "A teacher would say, I marked the child an independent reader, but the teacher before says he's an emergent reader," says reading specialist Susan Hanson. To help ensure inter-rater reliability—consistency from teacher to teacher—the portfolio designers put together a list of "benchmark books" that represent what a child can do at certain points. Beginning readers, for example, can handle such books as Plop!, Too Big for Me, and Ten Little Bears. Independent readers can conquer titles like Loose Laces, Abracadabra, and Uncle Elephant. Teachers also are encouraged to work in teams and share strategies so that portfolios look alike from classroom to classroom.
Another piece of the portfolio mix—teacher narratives—changed practice, too. Two quarters each year, teachers meet personally with parents. On alternate quarters, teachers write about students' language arts achievement and file the narratives in the yellow portfolios. Knowing that they must describe the details of students' progress sharpens teachers' observations and deepens their understanding of each child's growth, says Hanson.
"During the whole quarter, I take more notes, thinking ahead to when I will write my narrative," she says. "I want to make sure I'm not inventing things. Writing is thinking, so as you're writing, you're really thinking about that child, and you find out things you didn't even know about her based on the data you collected."
Some teachers address the narrative to the student. Last year, one teacher wrote in part:
Dear Ryan,
Your reading has shown much improvement. You're beginning to read with more expression. I'm pleased with your efforts. You've done a better job of choosing books and using your silent time effectively. Your abilities will continue to grow if you keep up the effort. You're gaining skill in decoding new and unfamiliar words. You didn't let mistakes stop you, even when the task was hard.
The narratives and continuums have replaced traditional report cards in language arts in first and second grades. As teachers moved away from the old skills-based curriculum with heavy reliance on basal readers, phonics, and worksheets into a meaning-based curriculum built on literature and wholistic strategies, assigning letter grades began to feel like wearing an old pair of shoes with a new suit.
"If we just had a straight report card—A, B, C grades on whether students could read short or long vowels or whether they were on grade level—we could still be teaching the old way and not using the current language research," says Suzie Cary, Principal of Harborview Elementary School.
Sorenson echoes those sentiments: "What we had before was a comparison thing—are you on grade level or not? Are you on this basal reader or not? A report card says you got an A—an A for what? Because you smiled a lot? Because you finished the assignments? Because you showed up every day?"
As a whole, the portfolios are not scored. But marking the continuums and writing narratives takes time—the "t" word that is cause for constant lamentation in K-12 education.
"The narratives take at least 20 to 30 minutes per child," says Susan Hanson, the reading specialist who works with Title I students at Glacier Valley Elementary School. "You can do it in five or 10 minutes, but you get so carried away when you're sitting there writing about that child that you take longer. Before you know it, it's 11 or 12 at night, and the next day you're angry because you're so tired. And you think, 'What is this portfolio process?'"
Just managing the piles of paper that mount up in the portfolios can crowd teachers' schedules. District people tell stories of weary teachers standing at the copy machine duplicating portfolio pages for parents and wielding three-hole punches for hours on end as they compile the portfolios that will travel with the child from one grade level to another, year after year.
To address the time problem, the district has secured grants from government and private foundations to give teachers two extra days for writing and managing the portfolios. It also has invested heavily in technology. Every K-8 teacher now has a Macintosh at her desk, where she can write and store her narratives efficiently.
Despite these central-office efforts to ease the burden, the "t" word still comes up consistently as the biggest drawback of portfolios.
"We don't want our teachers to have to do it on the evenings and weekends," says Principal Cary. "But we haven't been able to get away from the teacher-intensive time involved."
"I see myself as a writer: stronger, wiser, energetic, and yet still young in the ways of words. I see myself as a mathematician: more capable in doing math equations, stronger in problem-solving, and wiser in the ways of math. I see myself as a history student: open-minded, information sucker and information seeker. I've found that this world has gone through a lot of changes, and it is our duty to study them and learn from their mistakes."
--Peter Moore, freshman
Phoenix program
Juneau Douglas High School
Audience and purpose are the nagging questions that vex Juneau's portfolio proponents. "We've had thousands of discussions on who is the audience and what is the purpose," says Cary. "We still discuss that every time we meet. The answer is, 'It depends.'"
Juneau's portfolios are far from being random collections of "stuff"—one of the biggest pitfalls that assessment researchers warn against. Still, their purpose is a mixed bag. They celebrate each child's growth at the same time they measure grade-level and district progress. For example:
Among all the possible audiences, the students themselves are perhaps the most important. "Students can look back on their work at the end of the year and see how they've grown," says Cary. "At the primary level in writing, for example, that might mean scribbling and drawing pictures at the beginning of the year, writing sentences and paragraphs at the end."
As Sorenson sees it, portfolios put the "mom" into assessment. They focus attention on the incremental changes that parents see and celebrate as their children grow. "Portfolios are great evidence of 'Look where you are!'" she notes. "Who doesn't love to hear the stories that moms tell about 'When you were little, you used to....'?"
Kids take part in compiling their portfolios. They choose samples of schoolwork to include. Each year, they write an essay about the strides they've made as readers and writers. In some classes, students as young as first-graders lead parent conferences, presenting their portfolios page by page. (For more on student-led conferences, see Caity’s Conference.)
Self-reflection is the heart of the portfolio process and the key to its success. "The most important thing is for students to learn to look at their own learning, to take some ownership and responsibility for it, rather than turning it in and then it's the teacher's product," says Cary. "Out in the world, you have to be your own editor and critic."
Most parents have been supportive of portfolios from Year One, when a group of first-grade teachers gave detailed presentations on the content, purpose, and mechanics of portfolios at fall parent-teacher conferences. When teachers are comfortable and well-versed in the hows and whys of portfolios, they are able to pass on that confidence to parents, Sorenson notes.
Portfolios have popped up, too, in Juneau's secondary programs. The high school's Phoenix program, with an emphasis on independent learning and advanced technology, requires students to compile extensive portfolios keyed to state and national standards. And Dzantik'i Heeni Middle School uses rubrics, self-reflection, and portfolios in its assessment mix.
Having grappled with design and implementation for eight years, the Juneau portfolio entrepreneurs share their hard-won expertise with districts around the state. Among their recommendations are:
Juneau continues to wrestle with portfolios. Not all teachers are on board. Many resist looking at last year's portfolios, wanting to form their own judgments about students' abilities. Some see portfolios as the latest flash-in-the-pan reform, and they're waiting for them to go away. The changes were introduced too quickly or too slowly, depending on whom you talk to. Some say kids need to be more involved in compiling the portfolios. Almost everyone agrees that teachers need more training in how to use the portfolios effectively. And the biggest bugaboo—pinning down the purpose of the portfolios—is an ongoing source of frustration.
"We need to make sure that if we decide to have a high-stakes portfolio, that high-stakes portfolio is clearly defined," Sorenson says. "I think as a district system, we have to decide what that yellow portfolio is."
Problems aside, portfolios have taken hold in Juneau and are being folded, little by little, into classroom culture. The place where curriculum, instruction, and assessment overlap is where real change happens, says Sorenson. It is at that convergence, she says, where Juneau's portfolios reside. And it is in that linking and blending that portfolios have their power.
"In addition to making our teachers much better teachers, the portfolio process has made a lot of our students much better learners," says Tonkovich. "Ultimately, as in all of education, it depends on the teacher. In classrooms where it's done well, portfolios have really made a difference for kids."
RESOURCE NOTES: Juneau has published its hard-won portfolio strategies in two handbooks, one for primary grades and one for intermediate grades. The Juneau Language Arts Portfolio Handbook is an indepth description of the district's portfolio process, complete with directions for teachers. Designed by a team of teachers and curriculum specialists, and based upon feedback from teachers experienced in using the portfolio process, the documents include, among other things:
To obtain copies of the Juneau Language Arts Portfolio Handbook, contact the Curriculum Department, Juneau Borough Public Schools, (907) 463-1967.
For related information, see Juneau Language Arts Portfolio, Clear and Visible Targets, and Culture Clash.
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But Sorenson cautions against using portfolios for inappropriate purposes or contradictory goals. "Is our purpose," she asks, "to help kids understand themselves as learners, knowing who they are and where they've been, pulling their story together? That purpose looks very different from using the portfolio to show us that Johnnie is reaching the district goals."
"Dear Mom and Dad,
I guess this is the last portfolio letter you'll have to read...bummer. Well, I've tried something a little different this time—you'll notice that this portfolio is divided by the categories of Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive skills. In this portfolio, I would like to show the levels of thinking that Phoenix requires, how they relate to my level of work, and how my work has progressed and improved. I've included explanations throughout the portfolio; this is not simply a collection of my work. I really do want you to read through this. You might actually learn something."
—Chad Denton, senior
Phoenix program
Juneau Douglas High School
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