Last week, I had the opportunity to review student portfolios at my school. This was year 3 of the idea that myself and a fellow teacher had during the COVID year and it’s been growing bit-by-bit ever since. Luckily, new staff member support and a push from admin finally brought the whole portfolio project to a culmination. We brought community members into the building on separate occasions during the this semester to sit with students as they presented their portfolios to them. We had staff members strategically working with students to prepare their portfolios in a digital format ready to be used as a personal showcase of their work throughout the year.

We started with the idea of prompting students to be creative by making business cards about themselves in Adobe Express and then posting them to a Google Site that would be shared and reflected on throughout their high school career. Over the past 3 years, it’s gone into development every single year. But this was the time when we actually got it off the ground because we had enough teachers to carry the weight of developing the portfolio across multiple grade levels and we were benefiting from 3 years of students aging up into the portfolio process. Starting portfolio’s school-wide is incredibly difficult because seniors and juniors may have very little content at the end of the first year. So you have to reevaluate rubrics and expectations for those completing the task in a 6-month model versus students who’ve been doing that for 3 years when you started it before.

Now, those original students are sophomores and juniors. They have some collections of ideas and artifacts and the beginnings of a student centered portrait of their chosen work. Some of the seniors were not part of the first group because they were a year older than the 8th graders 9th graders when we started. They did share anxiety because we did not incluse them in the process over the last 2 years and instead focused on the younger students. Any school that’s looking to do this should have a whole school idea for a multi-year process You cannot just begin portfolios in a school without having rubrics adjusted and an idea for the students that come in or we’re not part of the process through the entire year.

An unexpected surprise during this process for me, was meeting a student who actually wanted to begin a WordPress blog. We got the chance to walk through my professional blog here and talk about how to develop a plan for a professional WordPress blog that would highlight his digital and graphic art. We talked about how to build the larger webspace and not get overwhelmed or districted by ideas. We talked about focusing on one page at a time and creating teaser elements for his audience. We then talked about a schedule and what would happen to his school site as he began focusing on his personal one. In the end, I got to share why I Blog and how I manage to focus on my work. It was an amazingly pleasant and unexpecred conversation. 

I’ve wanted to give up on my blog more than once and have gone months at a time without making post. This week, helped me remember why it’s worth it to talk to others about your creative skills and what works and what doesn’t for you and your classroom.