USE OF PORTFOLIOS

Image taken from www.google.com 

A portfolio can be defined as a useful way of collecting of students’ work, letting teachers realize their effort, progress and achievements. Portfolios have a communicative purpose and are led to awake students’ creativity, since they have to decide on their own choices of  decoration and style for the portfolio. Doing this, they will be able to create more purposeful future projects.

Using portfolios is a very good idea , since they let teachers know insights about students’ use of language and the strategies they prefer to learn and practice it. If we decide to pick this kind of alternative assessment, we have to take into account that it’s going to be quite challenging, because they are time-consuming and we need to count with a wide disposition to do working on it.

Regarding a portfolio building-up process, we have to keep in mind the importance of students’ voice on its successful implementation. As this is a student-centered activity, teachers have to consider students’ opinions, discussions and contributions. They will have to come up with good and fair ideas of organization; teachers have to give them the assessment criteria, activities included in their recollection and topics to be covered in the portfolio.

Teachers should consider using portfolios as a very active and interesting way to get to students’ creativity and interactive abilities. Portfolios are based on discussions as a fundamental part of class lessons; they can be checked in groups, individually or altogether. It is  important to consider students’ needs and come up with a very good planning that should cover all those requirements for using it.

In their portfolios, students can reflect on their use of language, they can interact and create their own work as well as take responsibility on keeping it organized and interesting for anyone who would like to check it out: parents, teachers, classmates. As we see, this provokes students’ autonomy and originality.