Tag: portfolio

Things I Know 311 of 365: Schools need question portfolios

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.

– e.e. cummings

I stood in the snack food aisle today, in awe of what we can do to a potato. Beyond ridges or smooth, the modern potato chip can look like pretty much anything we want it to look like and taste like pretty much anything we want it to taste like.

Humankind has mastered the potato.

Take that, blight!

After the awe, I started to wonder. How do we do it? How do we make this batch of potato chips taste like dill pickles and that batch taste like prawns? When I buy ketchup-flavored potato chips, is it because they used ketchup or they found the chemicals necessary to make potatoes taste like ketchup? I had to start looking for the dishwashing liquid because the potato chips were too interesting.

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On the drive home, I started thinking about potato chips and how we keep track of students’ learning.

Portfolio assessment has been around for a while and more resources have been devoted to its use and misuse than I care to plumb. What if we’re doing it wrong?

What if, instead of or in addition to student work, we were to keep a portfolio of the questions students asked?

Imagine a question portfolio that followed students throughout their time in school that reminded them and their teachers of the questions with which they’d wrestled as they learned. What would it look like if, attached to each question, was the latest iteration or the lineage of answers the student had crafted for that question?

What difference would it mean to create a culture of learning where parents were encouraged to ask their children, “What questions did you ask today in school?”

I have a suspicion that in valuing questions, we’d have no other choice but to make school into places where students had the space to answer the questions they thought most intriguing. It also seems likely to me that a student who has been taught the value of a good question and been given the support, resources, and space to seek answers will have no trouble learning anything that’s necessary throughout her life.

We do a decent job of telling kids there are no stupid questions, but a horrible job at showing them that the act of questioning isn’t stupid.

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Once I got home, I remembered I’d read a passage about the science of potato chips in David Bodanis’s The Secret House. I found it on my shelf and started searching for answers to my grocery store questions.

What questions did you ask today?

Things I Know 166 of 365: Packing the unofficial portfolio

God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.

– J.M. Barrie

I began the packing process today. It’s got me wondering who will carry the memories. If you’d ask me before I would have pointed you in the direction of a hanging folder that’s moved with me through three schools now.

In it are the notes and cards, the projects and essays from students over the last 8 years. I would have told you this was the vault of sorts in which I keep the good stuff.

Packing has proven me wrong.

Every folder or drawer at school revealed some speck of awesomeness from a former student.

Home has the same issues. In the fire box that holds my tax information from years past and documents like the title to my car I found a folder of essays and poems that struck me as such seminal works when they came across my desk that I packed them in a box and moved them with me from Florida.

One note in telltale eighth grader scrawl professed, “You taught me language arts can be cool. And now I want to be a teacher.”

You can imagine the difficulty each of these stowaway memories is posing for the packing. When I leave next week, I’ll be taking with me only what can fit in my car.

Birthday cards from my great-uncle, thank you notes from friends in whose weddings I stood up, my own school pictures – these were tossed out with ease.

The poem from the classically preppy kid who had a witty retort for everything in class but poured verse from his pencil like a stopper had been removed from a bottle? That, and its ilk, sit on my bedroom floor in a pile with fate uncertain.

I realize most of these students have forgotten what they wrote. For some years have gone by without a remembrance that I once taught them.

Still, part of me wants to hold on to all of these artifacts of former personhood as historical markers of the people they have and will become.

“You made such things of beauty and kindness,” I want to say, “And in those moments, you gave what I did with my life more richness than I could have given it on my own.”

These are the most meaningful pieces of my teaching portfolio.

In the end, I’ll pare the collection down. Some night soon, in the delirium of late-night packing, I’ll hold two equally lovely pieces in my hand and make the Confusion decision of what gets kept and what gets dumped.

I’ll have to trust that the story of who each of those former students is now tells the story  of who they were.

And who I was.