Stevenson teachers pilot cultural-comparison portfolio in capstone Spanish course

Sam Figueroa and Christina Mueller, teachers in the district’s multilingual learning division, presented the Advanced Conversation and Culture course to the Adlai E. Stevenson HSD 125 Board of Education, describing a new cultural-comparison portfolio that gives students repeated presentational writing opportunities and structured peer feedback.

The teachers said the portfolio model spreads assessment across four opportunities in a six-week unit so students revise and reflect. "It all really comes down to student agency," Sam Figueroa said, arguing the approach increases student ownership of learning and peer engagement.

Christina Mueller described the portfolio as a persistent classroom resource: "This is a learning resource. This is their bank of everything that we've learned," she said, explaining the portfolio holds prompts, peer-feedback sheets and evidence…