BB&N SSP Portfolios 2025
What is SSP?
Senior Spring Project (SSP) is a signature BB&N program and a capstone to a senior’s education. Students are invited to design their own experience, fueled by their interests and emerging passions. While students have the freedom to choose activities to complete their final trimester, the structure provided by the four SSP pillars allows every senior to create a program that shares the same central values: Intellectual Engagement, Service Learning, Wellness, and a New Experience.
Through planning and experiencing these projects, students learn how to set goals, structure their time, and manage their growth. SSP allows seniors to take risks, learn from any missteps, express creativity, practice autonomy, and find joy. As our seniors demonstrate responsibility and open-mindedness in their communities and the world, we all witness the BB&N Mission in action.
What is a digital portfolio?
As the final major step of their high school career, SSP is an opportunity for seniors to apply their skills and knowledge into personalized projects that showcase their growth and interests. To document their experiences, students were asked to create websites (ePortfolios) and present them to their peers at the conclusion of SSP. ePortfolios are a compilation of the work students have done throughout SSP and contain reflections on both SSP and their time at BB&N overall.
To make the portfolios, students participated in a process of collection, reflection, and selection.
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Collection: Each week of SSP, seniors deposited “evidence” of their learning into their digital portfolios. They continued to take photos playing sports, at internships, serving their communities, learning new things, and spending time with their friends throughout the eight-week long project.
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Selection: Then, students began the process of building portfolios. Selecting colors, fonts, and other visual markers, they got to visually tell the story of their SSP experience through the design of their websites.
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Reflection: As students prepared their portfolios for presentations, they spent time reflecting – both in presentation and in writing – thinking about what they learned from making websites, what brought them joy throughout the SSP process, and what advice they would give younger students at BB&N and as they plan for their eventual SSP.
Through the creation of portfolios, students were given opportunities to reflect on their experiences as they were taking place and have a physical space to share their experiences and learning. No portfolio is the same just as no two student SSP experiences are the same. The portfolios captured the uniquely interesting and challenging project elements as well as the joy students experience throughout SSP. Below are some examples of the seniors' phenomenal work.
STUDENT PORTFOLIO EXAMPLES
