For the past three years, I have been a member of the group at our school that scores portfolios. A new kind of writing has emerged–the transactive piece. The English teachers at my school were having a difficult time with cultivating this piece because it really requires the assistance of other content areas. To improve the quality of this writing, teachers in my school have begun a new collaboration project–English teachers become guest lecturers in other classrooms (like CAD) to help the content teachers develop the piece.

What I like about the new direction of portfolios is that it is more real world relevant. Because we are in an information age, the relevance of technical writing has come to the forefront. What I saw before in the way of transactive pieces were brochures about the same topics (drug abuse, proper nutrition). This past year, I saw more descriptive pieces about these same topics in magazine article format, the detail was richer, and the writings more comprehensive.

I enjoyed reading what Remona wrote in her blog about a presentation by Kathy Mincy of MSU (a wonderful lady, by the way, I got to work with her briefly in 1994).  She says:

The faculty survey revealed that, contrary to some popular opinion, teachers have seen freshman writers fairly evenly holding their own or improving in basic skills, with many more seeing improvement in the last 5 years. Also, when it comes to being writers, first-year college students are demonstrating significant improvement in understanding the writing process and showing more comfort with writing.

This was in reference to a survey given on the effective of the high school portfolio.