Internship Reflection #9

Portfolio Management

I would like to talk about the portfolio management in the classroom. Portfolios are a tool that allows students to hold their work. Portfolio management such as collecting and keeping students’ works is very important in art classroom because it is an efficient way to not only evaluate students but also help students feel proud of what they have done. But as many art teachers mentioned, managing portfolio is not easy. Certainly, filing papers in student portfolios easily tends to be a time-consuming, never-ending task.

According to Eric Groves, there are many reasons why portfolio managements could be important. “First, if you allow yourself to develop the habit of letting schoolwork languish in heaps around the classroom, you'll find it impossible to organize these materials in the future. Second, students love to retrieve their file folders and look at their papers. Third, many parents constantly ask to inspect their children's schoolwork to assess academic progress. Fourth, fellow teachers will appreciate having samples to refer to if any of your students are transferred into their classes. And fifth, teachers use the portfolios to assess academic progress as students matriculate to higher grades.”

 

 The portfolio management in the classroom I have observed doesn’t look easy to deal with since it has to include sketchbook work sheets as well as main art works. However, it is well-organized, systematic and accessible to students. I have been very impressed by the way the host teacher collects and keeps students’ artworks. There are file folders holding sketchbook worksheets and art works for each student and the folders are gathered in the same colored cover according to table number. And file folders 1 to 6 are situated in the same place which is shelves according to each class teacher’s name. Each class has different colored cover so that teacher and students can easily distinguish them. Since 2 dimensional works are majority right now, the portfolios are not bulky. The bigger and thicker or 3 dimensional works ongoing were kept in the bigger shelves.



Image 1



I would like to adopt this management method for my future classroom and it is a good idea for me to think about the portfolio management in detail for my future teaching career. Here are some decisions I made about the portfolio management for my future classroom. I would use thicker file folders and choose ones that are convenient to classify rather than ordinary file folder (Image 1). If I regularly assigned works like sketchbook sheets in order to see students’ development to draw, I would make notebooks which includes all  handouts of whole semester or year in order to have students works almost perfectly preserved for assessment. Because I found, in some cases, few students lost their sheets and some sheets were crumpled because of students’ clumsiness or carelessness. The expenses could be an issue but, actually, it doesn’t cost a lot in Korea.