The Portfolio Standard: How Students Can Show Us What They Know and Are Able to Do [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

“The variety of chapters by different authors is sure to spur conversations about the relationship among learning, teaching, standards, assessment, and portfolios.”–Iowa Reading Journal

Since the term "standard" met the term "movement" well over a decade ago, the phrase "what students should know and be able to do" has increasingly come to determine classroom practice. Now, fixed, absolute end-point measures dictate what we know about our students-grade level by grade level, subject area by subject area, school by school. Worse, our students have been backed into marginal, nonparticipatory roles in their own education: their voices no longer heard; their capacity to assess their knowledge no longer recognized.

The Portfolio Standard provides an antidote to our current national mania for measuring, proposing instead that today's standard setters learn from the students they are so anxious to assess. Without our students' active participation in reflecting on their own learning, the authors argue, we are left with static, outdated, arbitrary notions of "what [our] students should know and be able to do." Without such active partnerships, our roles as teachers wither. This book, by contrast, offers thoughts, projects, and first-hand accounts of portfolio keeping in the voices of the keepers themselves.

This cure for the mania in education for measuring and assessing, proposes that standard setters learn from the pupils themselves. It argues that, without pupils' participation in reflecting their learning, we are left with static, outdated notions of "what students should know and be able to do".

Jonathan Lovell is Professor of English at San Jose State University in California, where he teaches courses in methods of teaching English and young adult literature, supervises student teachers in English and intern teachers in all subject areas, serves as Codirector of the San Jose Area Writing Project, and coordinates a campus-wide service-learning program.

Bonnie Sunstein is professor of English and education at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa where she serves as Director of Undergraduate Writing in English and Program Chair in English Education. She teaches courses in research, non-fiction writing, American folklore, and English education. She has over thirty years of teaching secondary and college English in New England, where she continues to teach in the summers, at the University of New Hampshire and Northeastern University's Martha's Vineyard Institute on Writing and Teaching. A practical and engaging consultant, keynote speaker, and workshop leader, Bonnie works frequently with departments of education, universities, local school systems, and conferences of teachers. Her workshops on writing, literacy, portfolios, teacher-research, and cultural studies offer hands-on experience. Bonnie's books for Heinemann include What Works, Composing a Culture, Portfolio Portraits, The Portfolio Standard, and she has contributed many chapters in other collections about writing and research. Her articles, poems, and chapters appear regularly in professional journals and collections. She is co-author of three editions of FieldWorking: Reading and Writing Research (Bedford St.Martins). Bonnie has received Iowa's Collegiate Teaching Award and the English Department's John Gerber Award for excellence in teaching, as well as a Woodrow Wilson Foundation "Imagining America" grant for her FieldWorking Online project. She has led two national portfolio projects, served on NCTE's CEE executive committee, Standing Committee on Research, and was a Trustee of the Research Foundation.