Creative Portfolios: Putting a Spotlight on Communication . (2001). By Jane Urbelz, Toni Prada, & Linda Schreiber. Thinking Publications, 424 Galloway St., Eau Claire, WI 54703. 218 pages, $37. Reviewed by Ronna Siegel Woloshin, Evanston School District #65, Arlington Heights, IL.

This resource presents a variety of fun and creative ways to highlight children’s work, goals, and accomplishments in the area of communication skills. Appropriate for children in grades 2–9, Creative Portfolios gives students the opportunity to demonstrate their accomplishments, measure their progress, and monitor their learning. Creative Portfolios presents four options for portfolio development: a communication magazine, video portfolios, journal portfolios, and educator portfolios. Each type of student portfolio includes idea pages that highlight the basic components of communication, including thinking, speaking, listening, reading, and writing. The book also includes pages that connect the students’ communication goals and objectives to their classroom activities and home environments.

The "Communication Magazine" section provides a unique magazine format to organize and share students’ work on a quarterly basis. Each student is the editor-in-chief of his own publication and compiles his work into various categories based on what he has been working on in speech-language sessions or in the classroom. At least two sample pages are included for numerous communication areas, including articulation, fluency, listening, giving/following directions, syntax, narrative skills, vocabulary, and pragmatics. The pages can be assembled into a magazine or combined into a folder portfolio that provides the framework for showcasing progress and accomplishments.

In video portfolios, students may be videotaped individually or interacting with other students, giving them the opportunity to observe their progress in communication. The "Video Portfolios" section describes ways that students can demonstrate their progress in improving communication through video portfolios. After the idea of the video is introduced, students brainstorm, take notes, videotape, view their work, and evaluate their performance. Numerous topics for videotaping are included.

The "Journal Portfolios" section helps students become active participants in their therapy by writing or drawing pictures of their goals, and through charting their progress using a variety of portfolio pages. Finally, this book includes a section on "Educator Portfolios" to document and share professional accomplishments. This section includes examples of ways to organize service delivery and includes enrollment charts, year-end reports, and school goals.

Creative Portfolios is an extremely well-organized resource. In a very comprehensive introduction, the authors describe in detail the rationale, goals, and basic principles for using portfolios. Each section of the book contains a separate table of contents, followed by examples of students’ work and numerous reproducible portfolio pages. In the "Communication Magazine" section, speech-language pathologists working in educational settings may find some of the idea sheets useful, although not particularly creative or comprehensive due to the limited variety of portfolio sheets for most of the targeted communication areas. Many of the idea pages are quite simplistic, open-ended, or too general (i.e., "Draw pictures of six words that have your sound in it") and would need to be modified and adapted to meet the needs of specific children at various levels. Many of the sample portfolio pages appear to place too much emphasis on the child writing or drawing information, which may not be appropriate for many children, although many of these sheets present meaningful topics that can be adapted and used for oral discussion.

Since there are only a couple of portfolio idea pages for each category of communication disorders in the magazine section, SLPs will need to incorporate their own ideas and supplement with materials from other sources in order to better represent the work the child is doing in therapy. On the other hand, some of the ideas in the magazine section could provide some ideas for therapy activities that would serve as a springboard for incorporating a variety of additional portfolio pages. Instead of using the sheets strictly for portfolios, the SLP could use some of the sheets on an individual basis for homework assignments, collection in folders, displaying on bulletin boards, and sharing with families. The "Video Portfolios" section, in particular, presents some interesting scenarios that could be used for social language and/or a variety of carryover activities, without having to go through the actual process of videotaping. Some of the activities included in the video section could also be helpful in reinforcing children’s oral presentation skills in the classroom setting. The "Journal Portfolio" section provides a variety of excellent worksheets to help children become aware of their therapy goals and steps needed to reach these goals, in addition to improving self-monitoring. There are many usable worksheets in this section that display a variety of ways to communicate children’s progress and share students’ accomplishments with both teachers and parents.

The reproducible pages in this resource contain visually appealing artwork and "catchy" headings that will certainly save professionals the time it would take to design their own portfolio sheets spotlighting children’s accomplishments. Through the use of some of the suggestions in this resource, students have the opportunity to become more actively involved in their therapy goals and will take pride in their accomplishments and ownership in their progress. In addition, many of the portfolio entries stimulate metacognitive skills and help promote active and self-regulated learning. The use of portfolios in general education has recently gained popularity. This timely resource is one of the first that targets communication skills in the area of portfolio development; however, this concept has applications that can go beyond simply compiling portfolios.

This resource provides an excellent way to share students’ work and monitor/document IEP progress as required by IDEA. This resource encompasses a wide range of levels and tries to be many things to many people. SLPs in a school setting are sure to find a way of applying some of the versatile suggestions to some aspect of their work with children who are striving to improve their communication skills. The relationships between SLPs, educators in the school setting, and parents may also benefit as a result.