Portfolio in Maine

Hello, Massachusetts

Sandy Brawders
Director, CALL
Center for Adult Learning and Literacy in Maine

The New England Literacy Resource Center was established to strengthen adult literacy services in New England by promoting and facilitating collaborations and sharing among adult literacy practitioners, resource centers and policymakers in our region. NELRC will be doing its job if we can turn the information flowing across our borders form a trickle to a stream with many tributaries. Alternative assessment is one area of great interest across New England. Clearly, we have a lot to learn from each other.

I had the privilege to participate in the kick-off training for Maine’s Horizon Project in which portfolio assessment is central. The level of energy and enthusiasm I witnessed is a good match to the ambitious scope of the project. Its reporting and evaluation dimensions, in particular, tackle some of the greatest unanswered questions about alternative assessment. I am eager to learn from Maine’s experience, and I hope that we will all hear updates on this project.

I hope this article serves as inspiration for practitioners across New England to explore alternative assessment and to contribute to the growing body of information and experience on the subject. May this article mark the beginning of sustained collaboration on alternative assessment among all New England states.
— Silja Kallenbach, NELRC Coordinator

The adult education network in the state of Maine wants to thank all the teachers for the excellent work that you produced in the five volumes of Adventures in Assessment that we have received. Thank you for being honest, persistent, committed, creative, flamboyant, grounded and, above all, diverse.

All of us in Maine are hoping for a summit of assessment in the next 12 months and all journal contributors will be sent an invitation. I would like to thank Loren McGrail for her ability to encourage busy practitioners to share their work for the greater good of all adult learners. The five volumes may become a bestseller in Maine. I am using them as the only text in an evaluation course I am teaching through the University of Maine.

“Escaping flatland is an essential task of envisioning information — for all the interesting worlds (physical, biological, imaginary, human) that we seek to understand ar inevitably and happily multivariate in nature. Not flatlands.”
— from Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte

The excitement that we want to share with you is that Maine through its Quality Indicators has chosen portfolio assessment to replace our standardized tests, peer evaluation as our program review, teacher-based research to affect public policy, and a new reporting mechanism that blends qualitative and quantitative data into a usable commodity for program improvement.

Maine is doing what we call contex-tualized portfolio assessment. Each adult learner, each teacher, each administrator of an adult education program will develop a progress portfolio of their work for the year. This portfolio will not be scored, graded, ranked, or put in competition to beat out some other program for funding. The purpose of the tiered portfolios that build on each other is program improvement.

Each program in Maine is developing a baseline of who they are, what they offer, what they have for funding, how many hours teachers work, what services are/are not in the community to support next steps, what barriers might be insurmountable for the adult learners given rural issues of transportation, etc.

The baseline is the first item in everyone’s portfolio; the programs will measure qualitative and quantitative progress in relation to this baseline over a three-year period. The program measures against itself, not in relation to a program three hours away with four times the funding and a different population!

What counts is the articulation of action steps that can be taken at the end of each year for the purpose of program improvement. The steps and follow through become the basis of the self-evaluation of a peer evaluation process that may occur every three or four years.

In their roles, teachers see themselves change through their portfolio depending on the people with whom they are working. Adult learners understand their importance to improving the program for the next year. Adult learner portfolios are only one measure of a programs goals being reached. The yearly action plans of each program double as their end of year report, and gives the Staff Development Team specific instructions for prioritizing program needs.

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Through our Horizon Grant with the National Institute for Literacy, Maine has seven regional trainers working on site with teachers, adult learners, and administrators to create this integrated system of assessment, evaluation, research, and reporting. Reporting will no longer be a mystery that only administrators understand. Adult learners and teachers will know why we need certain things and will have the language to question whether we do need certain things!

This contextualized portfolio process gets rid of the secret language of standardized testing results, the secret language of funding, and the secret language of day school. This is education among peers! Portfolio allows respect and dignity to prevail!

We are using the portfolio process as a real curriculum for developing critical thinking skills and also as a vehicle to demonstrate transferable skills. Some programs in Maine are using video portfolio, portfolio on disc, audio portions, or a combination of various media. Jokes are circulating that we want to eventually send our state report to the federal government as a hologram showing the quantitative and then the qualitative. I think pop-ups would also get some attention.

The real point of the humor is that technology is giving us permission to think and display what we think differently. Yes, there are CD-ROM life-long learning portfolios that are not just text! Technology will change the way we perceive information. To believe that we will not find a way to report large amounts of qualitative data from portfolios when we have a computer with 500 megabytes of memory is absurd. We cannot allow a lack of imagination to stop us, especially if it means a more truthful document upon which to base the development of public policy and funding for adult learners.

Join us in this great adventure and leave flatland behind. Reports are meant to be read and anticipated, evaluation is meant to lead towards exciting change, assessment is a vehicle of building self-esteem and documenting progress, and research is a way to check standardization and assumptions.

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This article was published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 6 (Spring 1994), SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 1994.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.