Portfolio Portraits

by Donald H. Graves

At professional conferences, educational experts recommend portfolios as alternatives to grading. Professional journals recognize portfolios as new systems for evaluating teacher and student performance. Several states are using portfolio assessments for entire school populations. Portfolio Portraits offers unique "portraits" of portfolio keepers-from first graders to university sophomores and graduate students, from teachers in graduate classes to administrators in public schools-as they learn how to use portfolios, and the reader views that learning process. The book is divided into three sections. The first offers portraits of classrooms working with portfolios. The second makes some broader observations of portfolio keeping itself-as an established collecting practice in other fields, as a large-scale assessment technique for entire school systems, and as a teacher's means of instruction and evaluation. The third portrays four very different portfolio a superintendent, a college senior, and two second grade boys. Portfolio Portraits invites readers to join the twelve contributors and the writers they portray, to experiment with them as they work with portfolios. Keeping a portfolio is a long and disciplined process, but for those teachers and students who are willing to make decisions for themselves, portfolios can be intimate records of personal literacy histories. The reward is worth the struggle as portfolios not only catalogue successes and instructive failures but become inextricably tied to the very definition of literacy. To learn more about Donald Graves, visit .

212 pages, Paperback

First published July 20, 1992

About the author

Donald Graves was one of the greatest voices of his generation, a plain spoken, thoughtful genius. He was an educator, a writer, an outspoken advocate for educational best practices. His death was a loss too great to put into words for people the world over, whether they were aware of it or not. A Professor Emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, Donald Graves, with the help of mentor Donald Murray and contemporaries like Lucy Calkins and Ralph Fletcher, revolutionized writing instruction in the U.S. with the widespread practice of practical workshop-based language arts instruction. In his decades at the forefront of writing instruction research, Donald offered numerous works that continue to shape the face of instruction today and for the foreseeable future.