Portfolio Assessment Groups: An Overview and Invitation

Fall 2004 English Department retreat

Ilene Crawford

Risk of Faculty Disenfranchisement

≥Assessment≤ is a loaded term. As James Slevin argues in Introducing English: Essays in the Intellectual Work of Composition, conversations about assessment frequently disenfranchise faculty as the agents of education. We cannot lose sight of the fact that teachers educate studentsãnot programs, not curriculums, and not their administrative apparatus. When we talk about assessment, we must ≥put the intellectual work of faculty and students at the center of our educational concerns and . . . at the center of assessment models≤ (Slevin 211).

The terms in which we choose to talk about assessment can install or remove faculty as the primary agents of education. Slevin compares the following sets of terms to illustrate his point (218):

Programs-as-agents:	Faculty-as-agents:
Learning	Intellectual work
Improvement	Critical Inquiry
Team/Collaboration	Collegiality
Assessment	Review (peer review)
Measurement	Study (self-study)
Outcomes	Consequences

Slevin urges us to use the terms on the right, arguing that they construct assessment in ways that require the role faculty play in student education to remain foregrounded. The terms on the left , he argues, construct assessment in ways that turn programs into the agents of education.

Assessment Talk at SCSU

≥Assessment talk≤ is clearly growing louder at the institutional level. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It is entirely appropriate for faculty to practice assessment. Obviously, we already do. We assess all of our students each semester. We practice assessment because we want to know that that the intellectual work we do with our students is having a meaningful effect. But what terms are we hearing now that assessment is being discussed in broader contexts throughout the university? Are these conversations constructing faculty and students as agents? Are these conversations making the consequences of our intellectual work and our studentsπ intellectual work the focus? Are we hearing the terms in the left hand column or the terms in the right hand column?

Setting Our Own Terms for Assessment

I believe that we have a window of opportunity to collectively set the terms of our assessment practice within the department. We do not want the terms in which we assess to be dictated to us. We do want to assess in ways that reinforce our commitment to the values in the right hand column.

First-Year Composition as One Location for ≥Faculty-as-Agent≤ Assessment Models

First-year composition courses are one logical place for us to set the terms of our assessment and to practice the kinds of assessment that we value. First-year composition courses are the one location where part-time faculty, full-time faculty, and Graduate Teaching Assistants all consistently share the work of conceptualizing courses and teaching our students. Our goals and objectives for these courses emphasize reading, writing, and thinking practices that we agree are the core work teachers and students do in the University.

Extending Current First-Year Composition Assessment Practice

As many of you know, we already have assessment practices in place in the first-year composition program. Our portfolio assessment groups allow faculty to talk about and assess student writing in the terms Slevin includes in his right hand column. For example, our goals and objectives for English 101 create the expectation that students will be agents in their own education by asking them to analyze and contribute to scholarly conversations, to work with other writers to produce knowledge, and to evaluate the rhetorical effectiveness of the choices they have made as writers. When portfolio assessment groups meet, we discuss and make grading decisions about our studentsπ writing in these terms.

Participating with other faculty in portfolio assessment groups is a way for participants to self-assess as well. When we share and discuss our assignments, our course themes, and our pedagogy, we are situating and assessing our teaching choices in the context of choices other teachers are making with their students.. We continue to make better choices as teachers because of these conversations. When we share and discuss what we value in our studentsπ writing, we also sharpen our understanding of what we mean when we use terms like ≥rhetorical awareness,≤ ≥critical thinking,≤ ≥revision,≤ ≥argument,≤ etc., and what these concepts look like in student writing. Because so many of us share the work of teaching first-year writing, it is an ideal place to collectively practice the values that brought us to teaching.

In order to demonstrate to ourselves, the University, and the community that we are doing our work well as a departmentãthat our courses do have the consequence of students learning how to do intellectual work, to conduct critical inquiry, to produce knowledge collectively, to know the quality of their own work and the work of their peersãwe can use portfolio assessment to document our work and our success.

I invite you, then, to join a portfolio assessment group when you teach first-year composition. Practicing assessment on our own terms in first-year composition courses is our best hope, I believe, for retaining control of our assessment as ≥assessment talk≤ gathers steam at the institutional level. Making our case will require more participation that we currently have. Resources to help you are available at any time. Teaching with portfolios is an effective means of making you and your students the agents of their education. It can also create less work for you over the course of the semester, particularly at the end of the semester.

To further help faculty manage the workload and assess in terms that are meaningful to us, I have secured a modest assessment grant for this year with Bob McEachern and Kris Fury to develop a rubric to use during final portfolio assessments. This is an opportunity for us to set our termsãto articulate what we want to see evidence of in our studentsπ work, and what experiences we want to have given students in our classrooms. Your input in portfolio groups will help us develop and use and revise the rubric so we continue to make our intellectual work with students central to our departmentπs assessment models (Slevin 211).