Math Portfolio – Sharing my own story.

In Calculus, I use the third edition of Finney, Demana, Waits, and Kennedy. I love the selection of activities and explorations that are used to get students where they need to be for the Calculus AB exam. A colleague recommended that I check out Dan Kennedy’s website as a treasure trove of resources both mathematical and philosophical about teaching. One of the things I found there that I decided to bite the bullet and do this year is having students put together a math portfolio detailing their work over the year.

The reasons for doing this are many, some of them more selfish than others, but they include the following:

• By having a record of student work, I can easily look back and remind myself of some of the major mistakes and misconceptions that students have at a particular moment in time.

• I like reading and seeing how students respond to their own work. I often have students reflect on their work on short time scales (“I should have studied X or Y to do better on the unit test”) but don’t do as much over long periods of time (“I’ve become much better at graphing lines in comparison to when we first met linear functions in class.”) Part of this is because my students don’t tend to hold on to their papers for very long. I take partial responsibility for this, never holding them accountable for it, though I do occasionally remind them that the easiest way to study for a final exam is to look at old exams.

• I think students selecting what work represents their progress often means things that are very different than what teachers see as their best work. Sometimes students are afraid of sharing their failures, though we as teachers see those as being the most meaningful learning experiences. Whichever is right, having students actively evaluating their own work and thinking about their own learning process is valuable for being able to identify how they learn best.

My introduction to the concept of the portfolio took a lot from Dan Kennedy’s document describing them, and I am incredibly thankful for his decision to publish his document online. My own document describing the content of the portfolio and how it is integrated into the grade is here.

At the beginning of the year I introduced the idea, and the response wasn’t applause. It was, incidentally, very similar to the introduction this year of true student-led conferences. The students wanted to know why we were demanding they do much more work just for parents and teachers that see their work anyway on the report card. My responses, fully sincere, included the ones I gave above: portfolios are opportunities to highlight not the grade that was received, but the learning process that it describes. Conferences, however, went extremely well as reported by teachers, parents, and most impressively, the students. Since requiring students to also produce the portfolio, I have been equally impressed by some of the thoughts shared by students about what they do and do not understand, the mistakes they tend to make, and also some of the things that go through their minds when thinking about learning.

One of my requirements is that students write a reflection and scan in their skills quizzes any time they want to retake a quiz. This is my current implementation of standards-based-grading, though I am considering expanding it significantly soon. This raises the bar somewhat for what students have to do to retake, but I don’t object to this requirement at all. Sometimes I have to tell them to do the reflections a second time – in this situation, they usually look something like “I didn’t get it but now I studied and I get it” without any detail as to what it is, what “not getting it” means, or what “studied” actually looks like. Once I get them past this point to do some serious thinking about what they have difficulty understanding, I am very pleased with the responses.

I tried handling the start of the portfolio myself since I wanted to make sure they all looked similar in case these did become official school documents at some point. This was a lot of work keeping track of quiz retakes, reflections, scanning them in, etc – I finally turned over the files as they were last week and have given them to students to keep up to date. Some strong students, however, have nothing in their portfolios because they weren’t retaking quizzes, and the only thing I had time to really check up on before the end of the first quarter was that the bios were in place.

What I decided to do to show ALL students what I was looking for in the math reflection portion (with the mathematics exploration to be added soon) is to share my own portfolio with some artifacts from high school that I still happen to have. I’ve always guarded my test, quiz, and project papers from high school as really authentic sources of material not only to use with my own classes, but also to show students that might not believe I ever had any difficulty in math.

Here is my own math portfolio, complete with biography and student (namely my own) work:  Weinberg portfolio example

I shared this today with students and had some really interesting responses:

• “This is really your work from high school? Why in the world did you save it?”
• “You had a 63 on a math test?”
• “That looks like really hard math”

I got to tell them (1) to read it all the way through to see my comments and (2) that I was proud to show them some of my work along the way to becoming the math student that I was when I left high school. If nothing else, I am hoping that they will read it first because of the inherent fascination students have with their teachers as actual people (I love when they say things like ‘It’s cool to know you are a real person) and second to get some inspiration for the sort of thinking and reflection I want them to put together.

I know it is difficult to expect reflection to be a perfect process when it is new – it takes time and effort and it doesn’t immediately pay dividends. I want students to understand that reflection is not only a really beneficial process, but that over time becomes enjoyable. It shows that learning is a continual process, that you don’t just suddenly “get it”. This is the same process that I am enjoying about writing on this blog. It takes time, I have to make time to do it – in the end, I really enjoy looking back at my thoughts and holding myself to the commitments I make to my own practice and my students.

So I am leading by example. This group of students continues to really impress me when I expect great things out of them – here’s just one more way I am hoping to help them grow.