ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the story of two teachers engaged in a schoolwide portfolio project to involve students in self-assessment. Together with our colleagues, we employ portfolios and student-facilitated conferences as vehicles to give students greater ownership of their learning. By using portfolios to organize their work, our students are learning to set personal learning goals, engage in self-evaluation, and present their accomplishments to teachers and parents. Students also learn to conduct conferences with their parents, using portfolios to discuss past goals, propose future goals, and answer parents’ questions. Between us, we cover a broad spectrum of practice; Margaret Klimenkov (MK) works with fifth and sixth graders, while Nina LaPick (NLP) teaches a kindergarten-first grade developmental class. This chapter shows the possibilities across this spectrum.
