Manage Student Writing Portfolios

Help High School English Students Organize and Store Their Essays

Feb 25, 2008

New high school English teachers struggle with organizing and grading student essays. This easy system will save teachers time with grading and help manage work flow.

High school English teachers often have 150 students or more. They are expected to grade each student’s essays and provide helpful feedback. New high school English teachers will surely find this a daunting task. If you are feeling overwhelmed with the amount of writing your students turn in and are wondering when you will ever find time to grade all of those essays, stop to think about your classroom organization.

Students Must Take Responsibility for Their Own Writing

Over the course of a school year, high school students may write ten or more essays for your English class. But what becomes of these essays? The most efficient way to handle student essays is to put students in charge of own writing.

Student Writing Portfolios Help Teachers Help Students

This practice is often used by elementary school teachers: there is a designated area in the classroom where students place important schoolwork. In a high school English classroom, this involves essays.

Here is a helpful high school classroom organization tip to maintain student writing. Spend some time arranging dedicated file boxes, one for each of your classes. Place enough hanging file folders to accommodate thirty student folders for each class.

Get Students Involved in Creating Individual Writing Portfolios

The “portfolio” is simply a manila file folder with the student’s first and last name written clearly on the tab. Give one folder to each student and surprise them with a creative homework assignment. They are to decorate the folder in a way that expresses their individuality. Pictures and drawings are great, but you want at least 50% of their expression to be through words. After all, it’s English class! Quotes, poems, and song lyrics all work nicely. Encourage students to adopt or create a personal motto and to display it prominently on their folder. Students will turn folders in to the file box for their class period, arranging folders in alphabetical order by last name for your convenience.

Students Maintain Their Individual Writing Portfolios

Now students will have a vested interest in their folder. Every time they write an essay, they must place it in their folder. Whether you assign an essay once a week or once a month, for class work or for homework, students need to make sure they end up in their portfolio. At designated times you will announce that you plan to grade an essay. To build their writing confidence, you may at first want to let them select the one essay out of three or four most recent for you to grade. Honor them by grading their best work. As the year progresses, you can announce you will be randomly selecting their essays to grade. This will motivate students to write well and make sure they’ve completed all of their essays and placed them in their portfolios. Be sure they staple their Editing and Revision Checklist to the inside cover of the folder to serve as a quick reference and reminder.

One of the many benefits of this writing portfolio system is that it does not require you to grade every single essay students write. At the same time, it doesn’t let students off the hook-- after all, they never know which essay you are going to grade. Students enjoy the benefit of developing greater fluency in their writing.

The copyright of the article Manage Student Writing Portfolios in Curricula by Grade is owned by Thadra Petkus. Permission to republish Manage Student Writing Portfolios in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.