Portfolios, Used Well, Are Transformational

Submitted by Janice on January 27, 2010 - 10:00am

My entire career has been about the enhancement of learning and teaching. It began in graduate school when I noticed that how we teach does not necessarily match what we say we believe about learning. It was as if we unconsciously imitate the teaching we have received, rather than exploring the learning we yearn for.

In the early 90s I became a business expert for what was to become the Open Source Portfolio (OSP) in Sakai. Since then I have interacted with a great many institutions experimenting, succeeding, and in some cases failing, with ePortfolios. The failures seem to happen when leadership expects the tool to create the transformation, rather than understanding that transforming how we foster learning requires continued strategizing for change.

Since the 1950s and more recently on National Public Radio, a series of This I Believe essays have helped us separate what truly matters from what does not.

I believe that portfolios, used well, are transformational.

Portfolios are a tool for educational change that can be student-focused, assessment-minded, reflective, integrative, and socially interactive, When student learning is the focus of a portfolio implementation and students are enlisted in the process of assessing their own learning, the resulting assessment data is richer and more illustrative of how learning takes place. When students are encouraged to reflect upon their learning and integrate it across and beyond the curriculum, they own that learning and are able to plan for the progression of learning throughout their lives. When students share their learning and seek feedback from peers, parents, mentors, and future employers, they become more aware of how others see them and how they see themselves.

Portfolios promote an awareness of meta-levels of learning. The best way I know to explain this concept is to refer back to my own field of language learning and teaching. Language learners are most successful when they become conscious of the structure and customs of a language. Language teachers need that same consciousness but also require an understanding of how learners interact with language. Those who teach language teachers how to teach require both types of awareness plus an understanding of how teachers develop and achieve excellence in relation to the learning of their students. In a similar fashion, portfolios can help students re-purpose their their earlier learning for application to increasing complex layers of understanding.

Portfolio software can be productively built, owned, and shared by the international educational community. The Open Source Portfolio community is an excellent example of this process. Institutional representatives with functional and technical skills collaborate on-line, by phone, and in person on a regular basis to support the current functionality and plan for future enhancements. The Sakai Foundation provides supportive personnel and collaborative on-line and face-to-face environments to shelter and encourage OSP community collaboration.

Institutions chart their own futures by customizing software to represent their own unique educational processes. OSP out-of-the-box offers a variety of ways to implement a portfolio process. A productive portfolio process takes into account the roles of instructors, learners, reviewers, and evaluators in collecting, reflecting upon, and assessing artifacts of learning. The hard work of a group of teachers collaborating to understand and apply their educational process to a portfolio implementation pays off when students more clearly understand their own role in learning.

Students who fully participate in the portfolio process build their virtual identity, own their learning process, apply their values and skills to the world, and represent the depth and breadth of their learning to others. Viewing the portfolio of a student who has assumed responsibility for his or her own learning is a truly powerful experience. One gets the sense of a person who knows who he or she is and who courageously and enthusiastically faces a future of possibility and promise. What better way to launch learners into a world of potential opportunity for growth and change.