Portfolios and the Process of Change

Portfolios provide a mode of assessment that dovetails neatly with process theories about writing. As we have come to pay increasing attention to drafting and revision, and to the development of self-reflection and self-critical perceptions in the writer, many of us have increasingly come to value the idea of collecting students' work over time and evaluating the entire body of their writing. Grading students' work in pieces, product by product, or making significant judgments of students' writing based on one writing sample produced under timed circumstances, has come to seem a violation of the very things we teach about writing. For these reasons, talk about portfolios is everywhere. We hear of their use in school districts (Belanoff and Dixon; Camp and Levine; Murphy and Smith); in universities (Belanoff and Elbow; Elbow and Belanoff; Daiker et al.; Smit); in state assessments (Vermont Writing Assessment); in the British school system (General Certificate of Secondary Education English Literature Syllabus B), and elsewhere in the English speaking world. What we don't hear a great deal about is the process by which portfolios get proposed, designed, tested, and implemented. Since the rash of educational innovation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, educational theory has begun to view this process of implementation as a field in itself. Implementation studies examine the processes of innovative change and their meanings, often revealing the difficulties and complexities of attempts at systemic change (see Fullan; and for an earlier view, Miles). But we who do most of our work in English studies often focus our attention principally on our proposed designs and the intended outcomes, not on the all-important ways that the pro