Teaching Writting in Middle and Secondary Schools, Chapter 6

“Although Standardized test can be useful as one measure of a student’s knowledge, it is imperative that they be viewed in the context of the whole child” (96).





“Students in our classrooms create and perform awesome feats everyday, and they should have a place to display their efforts” (99).

“When give ownership over the direction of their learning, they will work to their greatest capacity and in a creative fashion” (105).


“Clearly, portfolios contribute to student’s development of self-discipline, self-direction, and self evaluation” (106).

This chapter speaks a lot about creating a portfolio for secondary writers. It also went on both sides in regards to student testing. Of course testing is only one measure. Student’s abilities need to be measured with different activities and at different stakes. I started my first portfolio when I was as sophomore in college. I’m sure that nobody really reads the work that I put on there (yet). I do make it a priority to put good work on there though. After reading chapter seven and soaking in the portfolio portion, and what it can mean and escalate positively towards, I see why portfolios can implement a sense of independence and self worthiness for academic work. If I knew that someone was going to view my work as a high school student, then I’d make it worth my effort for writing it, and the audience’s effort for reading it.
I look at work I did two years ago, which I posted it on my portfolio, and I look work I did two weeks ago, which I posted on my portfolio. It’s fun to see the difference. I’m pretty sure that if this was implemented regularly in the classroom, then students may get that same opportunity and feeling when they post and look, post again and look back. You have facebook where you talk about what you’re doing in the next five minutes. If that’s not going public, I don’t know what is. How about create that same mentality with school work. Have a portfolio webpage for high school students to show their work for people to look at. Of course not every student will be intrigued by this idea, and their are lot of kinks to work out, but if students see that people are viewing the work that they do, then they’ll be more opt to put it on a web portfolio. That’s why we are doing blogs. We put small pieces of writing up here, you look at it, comment on it, and the cycle continues.