Claudia Loewenstein is a Teacher

Claudia is a teacher at Greenhill School in Addison, TX. All of her students love her because of her teaching style- engaging, fun, and at the same time highly educational. Her many talents shine through here too, as she has taught three different languages - French, German, and Spanish! Though she has been teaching for 40 years, her class is always full of fresh content and fun activities that all of her students love. A perfect example is the ePortfolio that her class makes - you can learn more about that below.

Prior to 1992, she taught Spanish at Southern Methodist University for two years.  She came to the Dallas Metroplex in 1990 from Durham, NC where she was a teacher of High School French and Spanish at the Carolina Friends School for seven years. Early in her teaching career she also taught German and French at Cody High School in Cody, Wyoming.

ePortfolio:

Purpose of portfolio: varied achievement models: Each student develops a portfolio which serves to showcase students’ abilities in the 8th grade program; a “body of evidence” that gives the student a chance to reflect on the progress made throughout the year. The product portfolio also serves teachers and other interested parties as a means for accurately gauging what it means to be an 8th grade Spanish student at Greenhill School and the range of student skills in any given grade.

The portfolio serves as an additional tool for monitoring student progress and exhibits the student’s efforts and achievements.

The portfolio serves as a tool for level placement when transitioning from Middle School language program to the 9th grade. (for example honors versus regular track). Middle School and Upper School teachers can easily share the information of individual students.

The Reflection components in the students’ portfolios:

Self-assessment tool: Gives importance to the need for students to think about their advancing skills. This sort of reflection opportunity provides students with a process that leads to a better understanding and appreciation of what they learned and how to apply it.

Self- advocates: Moreover, exercising an introspective component helps students with creating personal goals and using these tools for self-advocacy. Students become more aware that they are in fact responsible for their own progress.

Cool Factor: This is a digital generation and they are not interested in sharing their work from clunky notebooks. When it’s inside a digital portfolio the artifacts becomes more “now” or in-trend which is of course more in-step with their interests.

Creativity: Students naturally love to create products- developing and producing the portfolio is exciting and very creative to 8th graders.

An Audience:  Students have an opportunity to share work from their portfolios with one another and have opportunities to show their portfolios to their families. The reinforcement of hearing and reading their peer’s work expands their own repertoire, and they enjoy the process of reading and showing their work to an audience face-to-face, but also on-line to a wider audience (the world).

Parental Involvement: The portfolio provides the opportunity for parents and guardians to interact and praise their children for their work and efforts.  Additionally, it affords a venue for parents to communicate with their teachers.