We are designing an Open Portfolio Project in response to Maker Ed’s Open Portfolio Challenge.
The challenge MakerEd puts forward is to create a demo experience of what an open portfolio system could be, for the learner/creator in and outside of the traditional school setting.
Problem Statement
“Making a portfolio enables students to iterate several times and learn from failures.” — Megan, Cicconni, Director of Instructional & Innovative Leadership at Fox Chapel Area School District
Digital portfolios can help students concretely show growth, help them receive feedback from teachers and peers, and also help them reflect on their learnings. However, the role of portfolios for students now are currently a little more than a collection of projects throughout the years. At the same time, many educators see the great value of portfolio making and see the final product as an important way to reflect students’ growth. The lack of documentation habit or unguided documentation prevent students from realizing the full value of portfolio making.
There is a need to transform digital portfolios from merely a collection of works into a growth mindset tool.
Having identified this problem, our team would like to focus our project around high school students’ documentation practices in informal learning environments. We would like to examine and compare different practices to help students learn from documentation and develop growth mindset.
We imagine that a new open portfolio system can improve documentation practices by facilitating meaningful self-reflection and creating and receiving constructive peer feedback.
Vision Statement
We want to transform the role of portfolio making and documentation to a tool for developing important learning processes and achieving growth mindset. We are going to do so by scaffolding the process of self-reflection and peer critiques. We will know this is true when we are able to reliably gather teachers’ assessments of students’ work and evidences of improvement in the quality of students’ critiques and reflections.
Eddy Man Kim, Assisting Teaching Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, stated, “different forms of projects have their own languages”. To scaffold the domain learning, we want to encourage teachers’ involvement in students’ documentation by allowing them to customize reflection questions and critique guidance.
We believe that this interactive tool will encourage students to regularly document their progress, reflect on their projects from beginning to the end and articulate directed critiques, as well as receive them constructively.
