Vol. 43. 5 Portfolio Pointers From Teachers 🧑‍🏫

Back in October we hosted a whole day devoted to portfolios, especially how they tie in perfectly with the new reporting mandate. Since then, I’ve been facilitating more and more small-group conversations with teachers across numerous schools, and some common themes have been emerging. Here’s the top 5 things I’ve learned from talking to teachers about portfolios.

1. Portfolios Include Learning Journals 📗

When we hear the word portfolios, our minds often think of a collection of our best work. In the classroom, student portfolios should include both finished and unfinished work, student reflection, and learning progress updates. So part of a student portfolio is their learning journal, which is a place for them to make notes about their experience and help them process the skills they are practicing.

2. Prioritize Student Voice Over Teacher Voice 👧🏽

Portfolios are a great place for family members to hear their child’s thought process on the things they’re learning in class. Students can talk about their challenges, their successes, and everything in between. Discussions with Intermediate teachers highlighted Seesaw as the location for dedicated student content. It gives easy access to the camera, mic, and screen recording to empower students to talk about what they’re learning. It isn’t, however, a great place for actionable, formative feedback from the teacher. In that case, teachers still preferred Google Classroom for formative feedback in classes that relied on digital work (Docs, Canva, Digital Media). Work created in Google Classroom can always be posted to Seesaw where the priority is student self reflection and journaling.

3. Actual Student Voice! 🗣️

Okay, so now that we know portfolios should contain the students' voice, let’s just go ahead and get them to record themselves! In one of our group chats, the teachers discussed how little they utilize voice recording features in Seesaw to capture their students' thoughts. A Grade 1 teacher shared that while in groups, her class will discuss topics at length when posed a question. As the only teacher in the room, however, she struggles to capture everyone’s thoughts. Having students record short clips of themselves helps her tune in to each student's thought process and provides insight into everyone’s confidence levels.

4. Routine, Routine, Routine 🧘

Classrooms are a busy place, where not a lot of extra time exists. One of the best ways to ensure you’re regularly hearing from your students is to have a routine set up for reflection. This can be as often as once a day, to once a week, to even once a month - just make sure you add it to your schedule!

• Flashback Friday Template - This is a reflection activity I heard from a teacher that many others loved. Every Friday afternoon, you’d gather all your students together and ask “What did you learn this week?". This turns into a brain dump of all the things they learned, whether it was from math or PE. When you’ve got a full whiteboard, you have the students go into Seesaw and reflect on some of their learning experiences from that last week. Follow this up with an additional prompt, for even better reflections:

  • In what ways have you gotten better at this kind of work?

  • What does this piece reveal about you as a learner?

5. Modeling is Important 💃

As educators, we need to practice what we preach. Everyone should, really. And this includes having a reflective process in your own teaching and learning. By doing so, you model the behaviors for your students.

We posted about this a few volumes ago, but our favourite way to start a reflective habit is the How We Feel app. Quick reflections on your own emotional state can help you start identifying trends in your own practice and wellbeing. We’ve also found that debriefing a lesson with a colleague shortly after a class can help identify areas of growth and celebrate.

Here’s a quick article on scaffolding this kind of reflection practice from Edutopia.

Who’s taking a student planned holiday this spring break?

I’m totally doing this next year.