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| Jackie deMontmollin TETA BOD President Elect |
I have always been a huge believer in portfolio-based assessment, whether it be paper portfolios or the change in the container happening in the past several years into digital e-portfolios. Being process-based in our work, and teaching our kids to examine and refine their process is central to creative work. Pen and paper tests just don’t do the job! A scrapbook of products doesn’t tell the story! A process-based portfolio is an avenue for both formative and summative assessment that is useful beyond the classroom and reaches into our life work as learners.
The huge advantage for theatre educators in using process-folio assessment with students is the extension beyond the classroom into my other favorite topic…College/University auditions. Each year hundreds of prospective technicians, theatre educators and dramaturgy students audition around the nation presenting their process based portfolios to College & University reps. Beyond these three majors students use their theatre portfolios to interview for entrance into architecture programs, design programs and engineering programs. Portfolios help students tell the story of their theatre experiences as they relate to these areas and help our kids get into top-notch programs and get valuable scholarship dollars. More importantly, process based portfolios help our kids learn how they learn. By examining and refining our process we become active in our own learning and we become more creative, more able to solve problems and more able to connect content across the curriculum and identify how it all relates.
Process-based portfolios also become a built-in tool to advocate for support for our kids work and programs. Taking students to a school board meeting or to your booster club meeting to do a five-minute presentation of the process in developing that scenic element, costume or lighting effect, from the initial brainstorm of ideas, to the selection of that one idea or the inspiration from those ideas that results in the one idea scribbled on a napkin, to drafts of renderings, to failed attempts and re-dos, that finally results in a product. The best part is the portfolio process gives kids an avenue to examine, refine and hone their process and develop as thinkers and as artists! Digital portfolios allow our actors to record their process, reflect on their development and create interesting records of their development and rehearsal process.
One of my favorite beginning articles to share on building your first portfolio was published in Dramatics Magazine several years back and was written by Chuck Meecham from Evansville University and William Kenyon. If you would like a PDF of that article get to you started or to use as a resource as you refine your student’s portfolio process’ please e-mail me at jdemontmollin@uh.edu and I would be happy to send it to you!
Have a great summer! As you are thinking this summer about your instructional design for fall, please consider using portfolios in all of your classes, at all levels. It is a great form of both formative and summative assessment. If you already are using process based portfolios thank you! It makes a huge difference for our kids in reaching for those 21st Century and College and Career Readiness Skills!
You can learn more about The Center for Development of Fine Arts here: http://www.cedfa.org/