This book chapter published in the National Reading Conference Yearbook, 46th Edition, stands out to me as one of the more wonderful researcher/public school teacher collaborations of my career. Wow — the amount of work and thinking we did as we facilitated 8th graders’ understandings of the Michigan English Language Arts Framework standards at the time! This piece demonstrates how and what we did with portfolio assessment as professional collaboration, and how we became part of Carmen and Randy’s classroom lives. This work with David introduced me to portfolios as a viable way to archive and demonstrate learning outcomes and introduced me to Sheila Valencia’s work; it has also served as a model for how one enacts thoughtful and rewarding relationships between universities and schools. Because this research project also included a 30-minute drive to the school and then back to MSU, my education as graduate student was more comprehensive than what might be expected. Each time we drove to Holt Junior High, David would make a connection to recent research and debrief our school visit, and then he would either tell me about a favorite song from the 1970s and then play it in his Honda Accord, or he would point out a particularly compelling meadow and say that he was planning to write a book about meadows one day. I learned a lot about 70s songs I’d never heard and about the characteristics of meadows worthy of ending up in a P. David Pearson book.
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