Let’s Reimagine School…with the Help of Colleges

KEARNEY DANIEL
Jul 21, 2017 · 3 min read

Recently I had a conversation with the head counselor at our school. I asked her a (straightforward) question:

‘How important are student portfolios to college admissions?’

I live in California, which boasts an incredibly robust state university system, including a number of schools that routinely land in the global top 100. I was sure that these schools valued portfolios or, at least, samples of student work.

‘Not important at all,’ she replied immediately. ‘It’s about transcripts, SAT scores, and, to a lesser extent, letters of recommendations.’

I was floored.

My unscientific survey of Twitter and edublogs had lead me to believe that the current state of education reform looks something like this:

The buzz words reverberate around Twitter, Ed Week, staff rooms, educational podcasts. You know them: authentic, real-world, problem-solving, enduring understandings. Students should be challenged in ways that are relevant and timely. Apply, don’t simply recall.

Just last week a high school student named Isabella Bruyere posted a thoughtful piece to this website. It’s worth the full read, but for now I’ll share this:

[W]hy don’t we get together with our classmates and use our resources to work through a complex critical thinking question that relates to the real world as well as the subject. That is how you grow minds fit to solve world hunger, and etc. That is how you engage students, and cause them to be enthusiastic about a certain subject.

Exactly.

And yet for every Justin Tarte or Modern Learners or Education Reimagined or that pedagogical leader in your school, there are seemingly countless stories and anecdotes of students being drilled with facts and ephemeral knowledge, and then pressured to recall those facts on exams. Rinse, repeat, and onto the next class.

State standards and testing certainly deserve a fair share of the blame. I teach social studies in California, where the state standards are hopelessly long and haven’t been updated in nearly two decades. Worse, the just-released subject framework is an encyclopedia of knowledge devoid of enduring understandings. 985 pages of prose, anyone?

But I’d like to look at this from another angle: colleges and universities. For most of our students, college is the goal and, thus, what colleges are looking for becomes paramount. If we are not adequately preparing our students for college then we are limiting their choices and chances in life.

But what do colleges want? A quick scan of the advice from ‘college prep’ companies (here, here, and here, for example) and others echo what our counselor told me: rigorous courses, good grades, high standardized test scores, and a strong essay. This is particularly true at state schools and larger institutions.

It’s a simple formula based on information that can fit on a single side of paper. But does it serve our students?

Which brings me back to student portfolios — or, frankly, any format through which students are able to demonstrate real-world problem solving, critical thinking, metacognition, and 21st century soft skills, all over a sustained period of time. At my school we’ve had some very meaningful conversations about digital portfolios as a way for students to show all stakeholders that their learning goes way beyond a simple letter grade.

I’m convinced portfolios will help our students become better learners. But will they help our students with their college dreams?

Do portfolios have a place in today’s college selection process? Do college admissions officers have time to sift through pages and pages of work? Do they have the patience to see the nuance of personal growth and development in that student work?

The larger point here is that any conversation about transforming the way we structure student learning must include colleges and universities. Many colleges are already including more meaningful methods of understanding their applicants, such as University of California’s personal insight questions. But the weight of such factors when compared to, say, GPA, is unclear.

I find all of this fascinating and I’d love to hear from other people. What do you think of the college admissions process as it relates to the teaching and learning in our schools?

Do you agree with me that college admissions, to a certain extent, hamstrings our ability to innovate?

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