Saad's+Portfolio+Assessed

Dear Saad: Your reflective letter and portfolio zeros right in on essential problems of interpretation, of writing for an audience, and of expression through a variety of modalities and genres. These are key issue of teaching and learning. I like what you say about multiple readings and modalities of “The Second Coming,” because you make reading a process. You have to capture a general sense of the poem and then drill down to what individual parts mean. The same is true of language study. Students need to understand the wider context of the novel, the chapter, and the sentence, before they infer word meaning from context. You say, “ Students are first prompted to break apart the meaning of the sentence as a whole, before focusing just on the meaning of an individual word.” But really they should understand the largest context first, as in Lesson 3 of your summative unit, when you learn about the Balti culture from the Youtube clip. Then the language of the novel is more accessible, because you understand the cultural context. So language study means understanding the large context (the whole story) then the smaller context (the sentence). I hoped you would also say something about Standard English, because you quoted Muller about it not being a “bourgeois dialect,” but never elaborated. What is the relationship between home language and Standard English. I like very much what you say about writing, response and formative assessment. Students should always feel like teacher response is for improvement, not a grade. Of course every unit and marking term has a summative assessment. Your reference to portfolios helps define your idea of summative assessment I don’t think you use portfolio assessment in your units. Your teacher research into digital technology could take advantage of the medium to document the composing process. For example, respond to the unit prompt in a blog, receive a response to that blog, create a powerpoint outline of your response, then podcast it from the outline. The teacher researcher then has all of the steps of the writing process in Web 2.0 to investigate later as you study the student’s composing process. It was great to share NCTE with you, especially because you selected some terrific sessions to inspire your teaching. I thought it was a great conference, and it was greater because you and Val relished it so much. Consistently thoughtful work throughout the semester. 70/70