The selection process will require a great deal of guidance from the teacher at first. Students will generally tend toward the extremes - some students will want to include everything they have collected in the portfolio making it unmanageable and ineffective - while other students will discard almost all of their work as not being good enough or important enough to include. The development of a set of guidelines for selection can be very helpful at this point.

Students should be active participants in both setting the guidelines and in selecting the work from their own collections using those guidelines. By brainstorming ideas of what is important to include in a portfolio and why, the students gain a better understanding of what the portfolio represents. Once a set of guidelines are developed the class should go through a mock selection process using a "pretend" collection the teacher has gathered. This collection should NOT include the work of the students in the class to ensure that no feelings are hurt when a particular piece is not selected according to the guidelines. The guidelines should be general enough to apply to all types of work - visual, written, recordings, etc. without having to be re-written all the time.

Students are then given the task of examining their current collections and deciding which items should be selected for the portfolio. There should only be a few items with any one particular focus - one or two drawings, one or two creative writing examples, one or two models, etc. - to keep the size of the portfolio manageable and to ensure the students are discriminating in their selections.

Process Main

Best Practices: Pieces of the Puzzle Copyright 2003 Regina Public Schools and Saskatchewan Learning