Cultivate an Inclusive Community Through Learning Portfolios

On June 1 and 2, 2024, I was honored to present in the ManageBac User Group Conference, hosted at the International School of Geneva, Switzerland. My presentation is titled “Cultivating an inclusive community through learning portfolios.” In my presentation, I argued that inclusivity is demonstrated through guiding students in building learning portfolios, receiving and responding to feedback, and demonstrating how to connect classroom learning with real-life problem-solving.

Why did I choose to present on this topic, as I attended my first ManageBac User Group Conference? 2023/24 marks my 8th year of teaching in international schools. Before Hungary, I was in Vietnam and Taiwan. Earlier this year, I became a community ambassador for ManageBac after using ManageBac actively for about 5 years. Earlier in 2024, I decided to become a ManageBac Community Ambassador for several reasons: first, I am a firm believer and practitioner of transparent communication between students, the school and parents. I think transparency is the safety net for any form of learning and growth. Second, I think data-informed decision-making can support teachers to navigate through the complexities in daily teaching. Third, ManageBac allows us to create opportunities for students’ learning portfolios with multiple features.

In my presentation, the participants were guided through the following questions:

• What are learning portfolios?
• How do we define inclusive education?
• Feedback vs. feed-forwarding
• Real-life connections
• What can ManageBac do for educators and learners?

The questions led to organic discussions throughout the session. We started from creating a word cloud via Mentimeter:

From the initial individual brainstorming, one can see some commonalities. A learning portfolio is regarded as collection, celebration, showcase, and/or curation of learning. A learning portfolio focuses on individual progress and reflections. The word cloud resonates with what is discussed in a 2009 book “The Learning Portfolio: Reflective Practice for Improving Student Learning.” The author characterizes a learning portfolio as self-directed, mostly time-consuming, and evolving. While it is true that creating a learning community with a focus on portfolios can be time-consuming for both educators and learners, a learning portfolio can be a powerful means for cultivating an inclusive learning community ultimately.

Following the word cloud activity, all participants were invited to share how the following quotes regarding inclusive education resonate with their educational philosophy and practices:

The discussions turned out to be thought-provoking and rich: one group shared how they considered using Authur Chan’s quote to evaluate the progress in creating an inclusive learning environment. If one does not perceive their environment as inclusive as expected, one may ask– does everyone find a sense of belonging? If not, do we see inclusive actions in place? If not, is equitable decision-making present? If further not, is diversity acknowledged as a fact in the community? Such a self-evaluative list of questions truly helps us turn the ideal of inclusiveness into reality. Meanwhile, other participants shared how putting themselves in others’ shoes is the beginning of the inclusive mindset.

For me personally, it took me a long time to navigate and build an inclusive learning community. I grew up in a rather competitive learning environment in Taiwan. Later when I pursued my post-secondary education in the US and Canada, I told myself “you have to work hard to stand out from the crowd.” This was not really related to inclusiveness. When I started teaching Mathematics, I realized that many students struggle with math anxiety. I remember hearing this joke during my teacher training– “no one talks about history anxiety, English anxiety, PE anxiety… Why do students have math anxiety?” This prompted me to think– while my teaching philosophy focuses on cultivating critical thinking in each student, how can I ensure that students feel safe to build such thinking skills in Mathematics? My personal and professional evolutions prompted me to look further into literature on feedback and feed-forwarding.

Hattie and Clarke in their 2019 book Visible Learning: Feedback include the following visual to explain how feedback and feed-forwarding work for enhancing teaching and learning:

This time, all the participants were invited to pause and think through this cycle critically. Some of us pointed out that providing explicit and actionable feedback is seemingly absent from the 8 steps, and some of us focused on the ultimate capacity for self-regulation and student agency. The above discussions on learning portfolios, inclusive education and feedback led the presentation to my sharing of teaching examples.

Over the years, I have come to a realization that learning needs to be meaningful for students to feel connected and included in the community. In Mathematics, I focus on real-life connections. Teaching both MYP and DP Mathematics has shown me that research skills need to be taught explicitly for students to be successful in the rigorous DP program. This is usually missed in the transition between MYP and DP Mathematics–students in general need much scaffolding for the writing of internal assessments. This motivated me to start independent research projects for my Grades 9 and 10 students this year. This 10-week-long project ended up becoming a part of Innovation Day at my school, and I ended up creating a Google Site to celebrate student successes with the whole school community. Below is my vision for this project:

Undoubtedly, the process of building students’ independent research projects was time- and energy- consuming. The process became a portfolio, as students were required to submit their initial research topics, discuss and revise the topics, write outlines, complete first and second drafts, revise the drafts based on feedback from me, finalize the end products, visualize their written reports and present in public. ManageBac played a significant role in supporting the feedback-and-feedforwarding process:

Prior to formative and summative assessment grades, I had been using “Discussions” to keep students updated with the requirements from exploring potential topics, writing outlines and drafting. Referring to Hattie and Clarke’s “Effective Feedback” loop (see above), the flow of Discussions “sparks learning” and helps students “flourish in the right environment” (steps 1 and 2). The overview of student grades from the first and second drafts to the final products gave students a clear sense of direction (steps 3 and 4). Interestingly, during my workshop, I was asked if students and parents were worried about their formative grades and thus became demotivated for the final products. While understanding that this might be true in some school contexts, I responded that my students instead felt motivated to improve their ongoing research projects. I would attribute such a positive vibe to the transparency and effectiveness of ManageBac communication. The feedback sections reinforce the impact of knowing next steps based on students’ individual needs (steps 5 and 6):

The success of students’ individual progress demonstrated the power of using ManageBac for the feedback loop. The following feedback elegantly encapsulates the final two steps– student’s self-regulation and bi-directional feedback are the key to transformation in both teachers and students:

Now I am wearing my other hat as the CAS Coordinator. This is the first year for my school to have the DP cohort. Consequently, I am part of the founding team to build the CAS culture. The CAS features on Managebac have been genuinely embraced by my students– they told me multiple times that it is very user-friendly and flexible to include their CAS experiences and projects there, to reflect on their own growth and to build their own learning portfolios. They are really into “Let’s CAS everything in the mess of DP studies”:

At the end of my workshop, all participants were asked to reflect on what else can ManageBac support the inclusion of learning portfolios into teaching in their contexts. The responses indicate the hope of personalizing certain features:

To wrap up this workshop, the sharing and discussions centered on (1) cultivating the culture of feedback and feed-forwarding, (2) building an inclusive community through portfolios and (3) sustainable digital sharing through systematic use of ManageBac. As an attendee to other conference sessions, I was also inspired by other features in ManageBac. The new school year will be enriched because of my new implementation of these newly learned features and sharing with the ManageBac community in the near future. Until next time!