portfolios ENGL301 Writing & The Teaching of Writing
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Need to be in touch with me?
LEE TORDA 310 Tillinghast Hall Bridgewater State University 508.531.2436 ltorda@bridgew.edu www.leetorda.com |
Summer 2020
All Summer Session I classes have been moved online due to the Covid-19 emergency. Online Office Hours: Monday and Wednesday evening, 7:00-8:00 PM and by appointment (email me at ltorda@bridgew.edu to set up an a time). |
OVERVIEW: Portfolio grading is an opportunity for an instructor to evaluate students as a whole—not based on a particular assignment or even on an average of those particular assignments. Rather, the portfolio allows for an instructor to value as well as evaluate effort, quality of work, future potential, willingness to risk, and the ability of a student to recover from earlier mistakes. Additionally, for me, the portfolio is an opportunity to assign a formal letter grade to your work, a measurement understood and recognized by you, certainly, after years of the things, and by the institution.
But, most of all, the portfolio is an opportunity to take stock of where you are as an individual student and of the class as a whole and, as a result, adjust course (quite literally) accordingly.
A little meta-commentary of portfolios in writing classes. . .
This course uses at the portfolio as the summative assessment for the semester. In a traditional 15 week semester, you would have turned in a midterm and a final portfolio check in. In a five week period, that's simply not possible by virtue of the fact that you need time to digest information and complete the work.
This reduced time frame makes it difficult to include revision in the portfolio, which is a central learning outcome for any writing class--learning to understand and embrace the important role revision plays in the production of strong writing. Thus, during the last two weeks of the semester, you will have the opportunity to get and give feedback on your work as you ready it for the portfolio.
How spec and contract grading fits in. . .
Complimenting the portfolio assessment are the spec and contract grading systems in place for each assignment. The reading journal assignment, which includes all of your discussion board posts, is spec grading. In that system, you must complete a certain number of assignments to a certain specification. This is an excellent way to encourage commitment to low stakes writing assignments--and, remember, writing a lot not grading a lot, is what makes a student a better writer. This is an excellent way to help a student build a solid grade in a class.
Your more formal assignments use contract grading. In this kind of assessment,
What to include in your final portfolio
Your portfolio will consist of the following documents:
How to Turn in Your Materials
You have two options for turning in your final portfolio. You can either create the documents described above in one google doc that you send to me as a link. Keep in mind if you do that that you must make it shareable for all who have the link and not to a specific person because then I will need to get permission from you to view the document. The other option is to produce .docx or .pdfs of your material and email them to me. I have no real preference here, it's really just want is easier for you.
Deadlines
The Final Portfolio is due by midnight on Monday, 29 June 2020. I recognize that for many of you, once classes moved online, you enrolled in multiple classes or added work hours. If this class had run as originally planned, we would have spent 10 hours per week face-to-face and much of the work of the class would have been completed in that time. Workload in an online class always shifts towards more independent work on the part of the student. Thus, if this deadline is not possible for you, I can arrange for you to have an Incomplete. In order to get the incomplete, we need to talk about a specific deadline for your materials.
However, I also want to add this: book club, interview with a teacher, and the assignment design are very short assignments. Including the time you'll spend in class or working online in discussion boards, you will surprise yourself at how quickly these come together. And I am not asking you to write a research paper as a final project because the field of Rhetoric and Composition is new to you. You don't know it well enough to write a successful research paper in the field. Thus, an annotated bibliography, while work, is not the same as writing a research paper. The analysis component of that assignment is pretty modest.
I'm confident you can do this work, and I will support you getting it done successfully.
But, most of all, the portfolio is an opportunity to take stock of where you are as an individual student and of the class as a whole and, as a result, adjust course (quite literally) accordingly.
A little meta-commentary of portfolios in writing classes. . .
This course uses at the portfolio as the summative assessment for the semester. In a traditional 15 week semester, you would have turned in a midterm and a final portfolio check in. In a five week period, that's simply not possible by virtue of the fact that you need time to digest information and complete the work.
This reduced time frame makes it difficult to include revision in the portfolio, which is a central learning outcome for any writing class--learning to understand and embrace the important role revision plays in the production of strong writing. Thus, during the last two weeks of the semester, you will have the opportunity to get and give feedback on your work as you ready it for the portfolio.
How spec and contract grading fits in. . .
Complimenting the portfolio assessment are the spec and contract grading systems in place for each assignment. The reading journal assignment, which includes all of your discussion board posts, is spec grading. In that system, you must complete a certain number of assignments to a certain specification. This is an excellent way to encourage commitment to low stakes writing assignments--and, remember, writing a lot not grading a lot, is what makes a student a better writer. This is an excellent way to help a student build a solid grade in a class.
Your more formal assignments use contract grading. In this kind of assessment,
What to include in your final portfolio
Your portfolio will consist of the following documents:
- Identify between one to three readings that really made you think. Include a half page, typed, single-spaced reflection that tells me what your discoveries were--only one half page total, not one half page for each journal selection. This is low-stakes, reflective writing. You've read a lot about a wide range of things, and hopefully it has given you pause to think about classrooms you've been in and will be in. Select one or two readings that identify a moment of insight for you. NOTE: if you have a "U" or are missing Reading Journals, now is a time to turn the revisions in.
- Your Book Club Materials. This includes your book club journals and your book club final reflection.The book club reflection is a low-stakes, reflective writing. Because book club journals were kept in a single google.doc, you don't need to do anything for me to access those. I can look at your journals as I need to. However, you will need to produce your book club final reflection. Not remembering what that is? Check it out on the assignment page for book club for complete details.
- Your Interview with a Teacher Analysis. Our interviews will happen in our 1 hour sessions. There are different interviewees for different one hour sessions. You'll have access to all of the interviews, but are only obligated to include the ones you were in class for. For complete details on what to do in your analysis, consult the assignment page for the Interview with a Teacher Analysis.
- Your Research in Teaching Diverse Populations Annotated Bibliography and Analysis. In the last two weeks of class, you'll do independent research on an underserved population of student learners. You'll produce a brief annotated bibliography and an analysis. You'll have the chance to get feedback on both documents during the last two weeks of class. For complete details on the the bibliography and the analysis, you can check out the Research in Teaching Diverse Populations assignments.
- Your completed Assignment Design. This final assignment of the semester invites you to invent and explain a writing assignment of your own design. For complete details for what is required of you, check out the Assignment Design assignment on our course website.
- A Portfolio Cover Letter: For your final portfolio cover letter, I want you to reflect on what you have come to value about the literacy classroom. What have you learned from the reading and research, discussion and thinking you've done this summer? In 500 words, what are some things you believe will be important to your reading and writing classroom in the future. How will you value students, student work, student progress? What have you learned about your own writing habits, your own classroom experiences, and what that will mean about your reading/writing classroom? I don't mean these questions to be an exhaustive list, just things you can think about as you produce this brief reflection on our short time together this summer.
How to Turn in Your Materials
You have two options for turning in your final portfolio. You can either create the documents described above in one google doc that you send to me as a link. Keep in mind if you do that that you must make it shareable for all who have the link and not to a specific person because then I will need to get permission from you to view the document. The other option is to produce .docx or .pdfs of your material and email them to me. I have no real preference here, it's really just want is easier for you.
Deadlines
The Final Portfolio is due by midnight on Monday, 29 June 2020. I recognize that for many of you, once classes moved online, you enrolled in multiple classes or added work hours. If this class had run as originally planned, we would have spent 10 hours per week face-to-face and much of the work of the class would have been completed in that time. Workload in an online class always shifts towards more independent work on the part of the student. Thus, if this deadline is not possible for you, I can arrange for you to have an Incomplete. In order to get the incomplete, we need to talk about a specific deadline for your materials.
However, I also want to add this: book club, interview with a teacher, and the assignment design are very short assignments. Including the time you'll spend in class or working online in discussion boards, you will surprise yourself at how quickly these come together. And I am not asking you to write a research paper as a final project because the field of Rhetoric and Composition is new to you. You don't know it well enough to write a successful research paper in the field. Thus, an annotated bibliography, while work, is not the same as writing a research paper. The analysis component of that assignment is pretty modest.
I'm confident you can do this work, and I will support you getting it done successfully.