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

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our students' active participation in reflecting on their own learning, the authors argue, we are left with static, outdated, arbitrary notions of "what [our] students should know and be able to do."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.

BONNIE SUNSTEIN is associate professor of English and education at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, where she teaches courses in research, non-fiction writing, American folklore, and English education. She received her university's Collegiate Teaching Award for excellence. Bonnie has thirty years of teaching secondary and college English. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of New Hampshire where she continues to teach in the summer. A thoughtful and practical consultant, keynote speaker, and workshop leader, Bonnie works with departments of education, local school systems, and conferences of teachers. Her workshops on writing, literacy, portfolios, teacher-research, and cultural studies offer hands-on experience. She has worked on two national portfolio projects, and serves on NCTE's CEE executive committee and Standing Committee on Research. Her articles, poems, and chapters appear regularly in professional journals and books.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.