Implementing Portfolio Assessment: Suggestions for Teachers

Encourage students to think about how their portfolio projects can demonstrate their skills and knowledge in practical, real-world scenarios. Share and discuss with students at the start of the process the rationale for using this style of assessment. Give some real-world examples; for instance, as a trainee teacher, did you have to keep a portfolio of your teaching practice performance?

Offer guidelines and resources to help students develop strong presentation and documentation skills, and provide opportunities for them to receive feedback and make revisions. Use the ATL skills toolkit to explicitly teach presentation skills. Remind students that the portfolio helps them to identify and focus on their successes.

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Design portfolio assignments that build on one another and help students see the progression and integration of their learning over time. Review your curriculum, unit and task design with a portfolio outcome in mind. This helps to ensure balanced coverage of your assessment criteria.

Clearly communicate the criteria and expectations for portfolios, and offer students opportunities to revise and reflect on their work before final submission. It is usual practice in MYP to share at the start or even to co-create assessment rubrics with your students. If the desired outcome is a portfolio or journal, build this into your rubrics.

Encourage students to take ownership of their portfolios by having them select and reflect on their work. Remind students that the task is to highlight evidence of authentic learning. Students can indicate which piece of evidence rates to which assessment criteria. Peer assessment activities can help with this.

Reflection is key to metacognition, self-regulation and deep learning. A vital part of the portfolio is to structure the reflection questions based on the rubrics. Ensure these are specific to each project or portfolio; otherwise, the reflection component risks becoming generic and student answers becoming formulaic.

Clearly communicate the purpose and goals of the portfolio, but allow for some flexibility in how students choose to showcase their work. Offer opportunities for students to ask questions and provide feedback on the portfolio requirements. If appropriate to your learning goals, allow students different formats while emphasising the objective of the portfolio. For example, is it to be a process portfolio or a product portfolio?

Develop a clear and consistent grading rubric that takes into account both the content and the process of creating the portfolio. Provide training and support to ensure that all teachers involved in grading portfolios have a common understanding of the criteria and expectations. Encourage collaboration and discussion among teachers in both the planning and assessment phases of a project to ensure standardised, consistent and reliable grading.

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