Handbook on Teacher Portfolios for Evaluation and Professional Development

Pamela Tucker, James Stronge, Christopher Gareis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317922483
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book and downloadable resources show school leaders how to develop teacher portfolios and put them into action. They will provide confidence and credibility as you engage in:
- "high stakes" summative evaluations
- initial hiring, tenure, and other key personnel decisions
- fostering a school culture which encourages high levels of performance

This book and downloadable resources provide a reliable and easy way for teachers to:
- collect and analyze data about their effectiveness
- monitor and improve their own performance
- improve student learning

Adopting the templates in this book and downloadable resources will enable you to define:
- standards which describe actual duties and activities of teachers
- behaviors which indicate the quality of teaching
- "artifacts" which provide evidence of teaching and learning
- scoring rubrics which assist in objective evaluation

The downloadable resources, contain easy-to-use templates of performance assessment rubrics, feedback forms, and other documents to help you organize & implement Teacher Portfolios in your school.

1

HANDBOOK ON TEACHER PORTFOLIOS: AN INTRODUCTION

There are two ways of spreading light:
to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

Edith Wharton

Portfolios, when used in the ways described in this Handbook on Teacher Portfolios, can help teachers monitor and improve their own performance, can assist administrators or peer evaluators in acquiring a fuller and more accurate portrait of teacher performance, and, ultimately, can benefit students in improved instructional delivery and learning opportunities. Portfolios have been used extensively with students for the same reasons that they appeal to adults. They offer a more personal, constructivist approach to documenting, reviewing, and guiding one’s own learning. They are a means of linking and critically examining both the processes of your teaching and the student products that result from your efforts. They offer a means of making clear the instructional relationships among lesson plans, assessments, and student work.

In this introductory chapter, we offer an explanation of how powerful teacher portfolios can be as a tool for professionals. Specifically, we will address:

◆ Why teacher portfolios?

◆ What is a teacher portfolio?

◆ What is the portfolio’s value for teacher evaluation?

◆ What is the portfolio’s value for professional development?

We begin by offering a brief glimpse at why there is a growing demand for teacher portfolios.

Why Teacher Portfolios?

In the past several years, portfolios have gained increasing support for their use with students, teachers, and school administrators. Portfolios, as collections of work, have been used for centuries in the fields of art and architecture. Using a loose definition of portfolios, teachers have used them to document student learning, at least throughout this century. If we consider portfolios as the purposeful collection of work for analysis and reflection, however, portfolios are a relatively recent development. They were discussed in the educational literature beginning in the early 1970s as an authentic means to document student writing.¹ Within a few short years, portfolios were being considered for use with teachers.

At present, portfolios are used in a variety of settings for a variety of purposes. Teacher and administrator preparation programs are using portfolios to document the achievement of core competencies for licensure. In turn, these graduates are using portfolios to capture their formal training and their accomplishments as beginning professionals for job interviews. In Connecticut, portfolios are part of the assessment process involved in moving from an initial license to the next level of credential, a provisional license. Other states, such as Kentucky, Arizona, Indiana, and North Carolina, are also in the process of developing new assessment systems that include portfolios. Individual school systems across the country are using portfolios as a required or optional component of their evaluation processes, and individual teachers are developing portfolios for their own professional development or as a stepping-stone for National Board certification. In a similar endorsement of the concept, the Chief State School Officers have embraced the use of a “School Leaders Portfolio” as a means to evaluate the skills and knowledge of principals. Illustrative examples of how portfolios are being used successfully at the national, state, and local level are presented as case studies at the end of this chapter.

Teacher portfolios are appealing for many reasons, including their authentic nature, recognition of the complex nature or teaching, encouragement of selfreflection, and facilitation of collaborative interaction with colleagues and supervisors. In addition, the inherent flexibility and adaptability of portfolios make them an attractive vehicle for a range of purposes, particularly professional growth and evaluation. As advocates for the use of portfolios, we value the support portfolios offer teachers in examining and defining their own professional development and the central role that portfolios give teachers in the evaluation process. Portfolios embody professionalism because they encourage the reflection and self-monitoring that are hallmarks of the true professional.

What is a Teacher Portfolio?

“In its most basic form, a teaching portfolio is a collection of information about a teacher’s practice.”² Others view the teaching portfolio as a means to “demonstrate the teacher’s talents,” “their teaching performance,” and “teaching and learning over time.” These various definitions, presented in Figure 1.1, reflect differences in opinion on both the purposes of portfolios and teaching. Throughout this book, we will advocate the use of portfolios to capture the reciprocal processes of teaching and learning. The ultimate goal is to clarify, analyze, and improve the relationship between the teacher’s instructional efforts and the students’ learning. A teacher portfolio, therefore, is a structured collection of selected artifacts that demonstrate a teacher’s competence and growth.

Figure 1.1. Teaching Portfolio Description

Authors	Key Descriptors
Doolittle^3	“Just as an artist uses a portfolio of collected works to illustrate his or her talents, a teacher portfolio is designed to demonstrate the teacher’s talents.”
Oakley^4	“Teachers demonstrate their teaching performance through a portfolio with multiple strands of evidence that collectively depict the teacher’s approach and effectiveness at increasing student learning.”
Shulman^5	Portfolios have the “potential for documenting the unfolding of both teaching and learning over time and combining that documentation with opportunities for teachers to engage in the analysis of what they and their students have done.”

What a Portfolio Is Not

Although teacher portfolios should reflect a “teacher’s talents” as noted above, too heavy an emphasis on this purpose can mean the development of steamer trunks or “…scrapbooks filled with photographs of classroom life, along with affectionate notes from students and parents.”⁶ This approach tends not to be productive either for evaluation or professional development. We believe that an indiscriminate collection of artifacts does not encourage reflection on your practice, and provides no reasonable basis for improvement or evaluation.

Key Components of a Portfolio

For a teaching portfolio to be truly useful, it needs to be tied to clear performance expectations. We believe that if we start with what teachers should know and be expected to do, then we have a solid basis for documenting performance in a portfolio. By grounding the portfolio in the teacher’s job responsibilities, there is a basis for comparing actual with ideal performance. In Chapter 2, we discuss the types of artifacts you might include in the portfolio and how they may be organized depending on your purpose. Typically, materials are selected that reflect instruction, student assessment, learning environment, and professionalism. One example of teacher job expectations is provided in Chapter 2, and a more detailed version, entitled “Performance Standards,” appears in the appendices.

Purposes for a Teacher Portfolio

Teacher portfolios can be used for a variety of purposes, ranging from a self-analysis for the eyes of the teacher only, to a high-profile, formalized portfolio process tied to evaluation. Generally, these varied uses can be characterized as:

◆ low-stakes—wherein portfolios may be informal, less structured, and focused primarily on improvement; and

◆ high-stakes—wherein portfolios are likely to be more formal, structured, and focused on a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• About the Companion Compact Disk
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• About the Authors
• Preface
• 1 Handbook on Teacher Portfolios: An Introduction
• 2 Developing a Teacher Portfolio
• 3 Putting Portfolios into Action
• 4 Teacher Portfolios and Teacher Evaluation
• 5 Teacher Portfolios and Professional Development
• 6 The Role of Portfolios for the Teaching Profession
• Appendices: How the Appendices Can Be Used