ABSTRACT

Over the last 15 years the two of us, separately and together, have participated in hundreds of discussions about the development and use of writing portfolios. We have listened, debated, and shared moments of accomplishment and deep frustration with teachers, teacher mentors, school and district administrators, and researchers immersed in the attempt to make portfolios work for students in individual classrooms and in programs serving a variety of schools, districts, and states. The many conversations we have had with our colleagues in these contexts have allowed us to observe the different and sometimes conflicting perspectives that are brought to the development and practice of portfolio assessment. We have participated in many discussions, for example, in which teachers of writing who see student ownership and learning as the most important elements of portfolio practice find themselves at odds with those who see a need for controlling portfolio contents for the purpose of responsible measurement. In the early years of our work with portfolios, in fact, we found that dichotomies such as these characterized our own thinking as well as the most heated portfolio discussions we witnessed.