Eyes on the Child: Three Portfolio Stories (The Series on School Reform)

Although teachers across the country are creating new knowledge in their classrooms, researchers' preoccupations with large-scale assessment policies leave out any vital discussion of teachers' efforts, experience, and insights. In Eyes on the Child: Three Portfolio Stories, Kathe Jervis corrects that omission by presenting three case studies of teachers implementing authentic assessment. Her thoughtful descriptions of classrooms in three schools reveal how teachers address policy issues as they put portfolios into practice, as well as how they respond to the particular needs of their students and of their own values This book describes the efforts of teachers to develop new strategies for looking at children's work and learning in three schools that are involved in the radical restructuring of education in concert with networks of reformers (the Coalition of Essential Schools, Foxfire, and Project Zero). The assessment strategies that these teachers are inventing are authentic in that they examine what students can do when they are engaged in real-world activities and the creation of their own ideas and products. The first half of each of these three case studies locates the teachers within the contexts of their schools to show the basic issues they face as they put portfolios into practice. The second half of each discussion describes the portfolios that have grown from classroom circumstances. The first case study looks at assessment in a second-grade classroom in Provincetown, Massachusetts (Project Zero). The second explores the development of portfolios in Bellevue, Washington (the Foxfire project), a team-taught multiage group, and the third focuses on high school assessment and the use of portfolios in Boston, Massachusetts (the Coalition of Essential Schools). In spite of the different environments in which they teach, these teachers share a commitment to facing assessment issues on behalf of their students. Three appendixes describe the three restructuring projects. (Contains 40 references.) (SLD) The individual classroom settings for these case studies encompass an impressive range: elementary and high school, single and combined-grade classes, regular and special education, individual and team teachers; the schools are affiliates of Foxfire, the Coalition of Essential Schools, and Harvard's Project Zero. Though the contexts are different and the approaches vary, the teachers in these cases share an extraordinary commitment to grappling with assessment issues on behalf of their students. Their stories, like the portfolios they are implementing, are works in progress that provide a special window on human learning and school accountability Researchers, practitioners, and professionals who make and carry out educational policy and assessment will welcome this informative and engaging book for the wealth of insight it provides on a most important subject. The book will also serve as supplemental text in graduate courses in foundations, teacher education, school reform, and assessment policy Kathe Jervis ; Foreword By Linda Darling-hammond ; Afterword By Joseph Mcdonald. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 153-155) And Index.