Session 14: Teacher portfolios
For this week I looked at some examples of teacher portfolios and read articles describing the potential benefits of reflective portfolio keeping for professional purposes. Teachers who keep portfolios and reflect on their growth and learning can showcase their experiences and studies.
Amanda's reflection on April 25, 2014:
1. Why teacher portfolio? Why an electronic teaching portfolio?
2. What constitutes a good teacher portfolio?
3. How do you envision your teaching portfolio now after you did the readings?
1. The teacher portfolios are intended to provide teachers with a place to organize their preservice learning, present some of their best work in the field of teaching, and to reflect on their professional values and strategies. The reflection done in-the-moment (reflection-in-action) may ordinarily go undocumented but could be very valuable to teachers if they include it as reflection of an artifact used in teaching. Reflections done before or after teaching are also meaningful because they are likely to unite theory to practice if given significant professional analysis.
The electronic portfolios have different advantages and disadvantages from physical traditional portfolios. For one thing, e-portfolios require entirely different skills to manage and maintain a web document. Some teachers may need assistance to learn how to scan & upload documents, register for a domain or subdomain, format text and images for the web, edit code or embed other multimedia. In my opinion, these are valuable skills to acquire for anyone who hopes to share information over the web. Teachers need to know how to do these tasks online and teach students how to also accomplish online works. Other benefits include having a permanent resource (as long as it is actively maintained or archived) and being able to share easily with anyone who has internet access.
2. The Yao, et al (2009) article presented a critical view of these teaching portfolios as a part of certification and reflective work. Some issues with teacher candidate portfolios are insufficient rationale or explanation of what was included, insufficient documentation that did not well represent the teacher's experiences, or the fact that the reflections were superficial and did not contain insights into their teaching practices. In order to avoid these shortcomings, portfolios should be carefully structured to present a clear and deeply thought-out reflection on issues that are important to the teacher. The artifacts included in the portfolio must be selected with care and sufficiently explained and introduced for a purpose. That purpose may vary depending on the portfolio assigned, but a good intention to have in mind is to synthesize professional knowledge with professional experiences.
3. After doing the readings I would like to actually scale down the scope of my portfolio. I had intended to get a head start on my Masters project through doing this E-portfolio, including something from each of my classes over the last few years. I have reconsidered and would like instead to go more in-depth with my analyses and give plenty of justifications for the artifacts that are required. I want enough time to make connections between the artifacts and provide supporting documents and images that complement what I am presenting.
I also want to make sure that I cite some sources of the theories and studies that have contributed to my understanding of learning and teaching. I wish I had collected citations throughout the semester into one document but I expect that I'll have time to go back through our discussion posts and notes I've taken to find connections to what I believe about curriculum and learning.
Naji's reflection:
A teacher portfolio is an important way for teachers to organize and present information about their career. This can be a great way to demonstrate value and give others a sense of a teacher’s achievements and goals.
An electronic portfolio has the added advantages of being highly portable or even existing on a cloud server. Electronic portfolios also allow teachers to utilize technology to add features to their portfolio that wouldn’t be possible with a traditional portfolio, such as links to web sites or imbedded video.
I think that above all a good teacher portfolio should do a good job of communicating the teacher’s experience, qualifications, goals, and values. Secondly, a portfolio should be presented well and be somewhat professional.
Reflecting upon these readings has made me more sure of the idea of using PowerPoint to create an electronic portfolio. I think it is important for the portfolio to include a strong visual element and slides, and I have experience creating presentations with PowerPoint. II will continue to ask for opinions and advice on how to improve the portfolio.
Amanda's reply:
Hello Naji, I have just read your post and am looking forward to seeing your portfolio slides. I agree that having the opportunity to use visuals to present your work will allow you to showcase the "experience, qualifications, goals, and values" that you have from this course. I was wondering if you feel that there are any limitations with using powerpoint? For example, I feel that space is too limited on slideshows so I have chosen to do the weebly website where my documents can be as long as I want them to be. Maybe some of the features of powerpoint being able to embed media would come in handy. For example, I have created a prezi.com free presentation and embedded it into a powerpoint, which gives you a presentation-within-a-presentation. Useful if you want to have all of your SIOP lesson plan on its own presentation page for example.
To be more specific, when you say "presented well" what professional qualities do you think should be included? Do you agree with the our readings that reflection on our practice and connecting it to theory is part of the meaninful presentation? Or do you see the portfolio project as something you will wish to use some other way in the future? It will certainly be easy to share with others since you have chosen the powerpoint medium. Best wishes. Amanda.