Lessons from an accidental HoD, part 5: Making nice things

I struggle a little with the impermanence of exercise books and notebooks, especially when a new year rolls around and the books have gathered a fine layer of dust on the shelves. How often does a Year 9 student look at their accomplishments in Year 8, or Year 7? When do they take stock of their successes?

In one of the first schools I taught at, the English department had ‘progress books’, which were essentially collections of assessed work, feedback and feedforward tasks. They looked impressive. Students took pride in them. Then they got new ones at the start of the next year and the old ones were consigned to storage.

The principle was good, though, and it got me thinking about how to retain the idea and build it across a student’s experience of English, from Year 7 to, ideally, the end of their almost-inevitable decision to take A Level Literature… If only!

For sheer pragmatism, it needed to be digital. But it couldn’t be something that meant students were tethered to their laptops. If anything, less time needed to be spent on them. We wanted something multimodal, allowing for different ways of demonstrating understanding and responding to feedback, while also showing progression in skills from KS3 into KS4.

Through discussions with the team, we decided to set up student blogs with ready-made templates and guides so that students could get started quickly. The idea is that these become a space to curate work, revisit it, respond to feedback and, occasionally, share it with others. Students might include written work alongside audio commentaries, short videos, presentations or other creative responses.

There are useful links here with Media Studies. Multimodal communication is the norm outside of school, so why not incorporate some of that into the way students demonstrate what they know? There is also something to be said for just making nice things and the chance to be creative. Students spend a lot of time, care and attention producing work for assessment. Sometimes they should have the opportunity to make something they are genuinely proud of, refine it and share it with an audience beyond the teacher. I’ve written previously on the value of giving students opportunities to create things they are proud of, rather than treating every piece of writing as another exercise to be marked. I’m interested in how that idea works when it becomes part of a longer record of a student’s work, rather than something that disappears at the end of a unit.

That’s not to say that portfolios come at the expense of curriculum time, more that time needs to be carefully planned in. Students need a knowledge base before they can develop disciplinary skills. They need to read, acquire vocabulary, build contextual and conceptual knowledge, see models and receive explicit teaching. The portfolio gives them increasing control over what happens afterwards: how they present their understanding, respond to feedback, refine existing work and communicate it to others.

A potentially useful connection with self-efficacy is here too. Students rarely get to see the accumulation of their own successes or ‘mastery experiences’. Keeping examples of work shows them what can be done well now that they couldn’t do before. That might be better writing, greater confidence when contributing ideas, or simply being more willing to have a go. A Year 9 student might look at something they produced in Year 7 and see not just a toe-curlingly old piece of work, but evidence of how far their writing self has come.

It also gives us an opportunity to make the writing process more visible and to give students chances to write for real audiences. That includes being clear about the role of AI, that is, not a receptacle for slop. If students use AI, they will need to justify it and reflect on how it affected their thinking and the writing process.

The important thing, though, is that this isn’t another initiative being bolted onto an already crowded curriculum. In fact, this will be the only significant KS3 initiative we introduce this year. Workload matters, and so does doing fewer things properly. Time needs to be built into units for students to reflect, plan, modify and curate their work rather than treating the portfolio as another task to complete.

Giving students somewhere to keep the things they have made, to revisit them, improve them and, occasionally, enjoy the fact that they made something worth keeping is a relatively simple aim.

Suffice to say, a neat verdict on successful outcomes remains to be seen. It’ll be interesting to see whether these are used and revisited, and whether the quality of work changes. On an attitudinal level, and just as importantly, whether students see a genuine value in having a longer term record of development. I’ll return to that in a future post.