After some ELP samples viewed and analysed, no doubt for me about the usefulness of ELP in language learning process. It is possible to see wide range of them, for different education stages and so much information available about it. The portfolio is a way of collecting information that shows the student's skills and successes.
As a secondary school teacher of sciences, I think the key point is to get the idea of the features/actions involved in an ELP such as "what we learnt in every unit", "competences development", "reflections and progress at the end of the unit"... The integration of an ELP adapted to a particular curricular content such as biology becomes a suitable way to help students to manage their learning process, especially in CLIL lessons. Some of its benefits are:
- It is student-centred. It encourages the students to think about their learning process and to be aware about how their learning is being, how to regulate and modify it.
- Offers much information about the student and their learning process that is invaluable evidence for teacher to develop a more accurate evaluation (formative and summative).
- Setting the objectives and the descriptions makes the students know accurately what they are asked for.
- Allows monitoring the student's work
- ELP evidences student's achievements
- It is adaptable to a specific curricular content or be focused on CLIL, personal skills, professional skills...
But the biology curriculum requires students to learn many skills (inquiry skills, understanding, high-order thinking, build, analyze, synthesize ..) so, at first the fact of combine the evaluation of many skills turns it more complex and I see the following weaknesses:
- Needs long time to elaborate for teachers and students, especially if it is an ELP adapted to a particular curriculum content different that language learning.
- It is new that the majority of teachers may have difficulties to completely integrate it in the learning process. It needs planification, resources, qualification and preparation.
- The evaluation is more difficult to set because it needs to be adapted to the student cognition and cover all the skills and objectives required in the curriculum such debate, participation.
To sum up, teachers usually involve more in quantifying the learning and the ELP helps students to learn by assessing themselves. That of course is invaluable for teachers too. But I really think implementing ELP should be useful for the learning process in CLIL contexts and even though it is difficult to adapt the evaluation of science curricular content in a L2 is good practice to combine and try to integrate it.
PD: I found on the Internet a work sample about Australian portfolio of sciences (see links below). This Australian science portfolio helped me to have a whole idea of what a science portfolio is, to get some ideas about how to do it and to see a good example of how to combine skills and objectives. In it students elaborate tasks that evidence learning towards the achievement standard. It is said that it is necessary a portfolio for a group of specific assessment tasks and each portfolio comprises a collection of students’ work drawn from a range of assessment tasks.
Resources:
Year 10 Science Portfolio - Satisfactory
Year 10 Science Portfolio - Above Satisfactory
Year 10 Science Portfolio - Below Satisfactory