Educators Making Portfolios
1999; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 80; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-6487
Autores Tópico(s)Teacher Education and Leadership Studies
ResumoFirst Results from National School Reform Faculty What if educators presented portfolio evidence of their own learning and growth? What if they tried to show in concrete ways how that growth affects student learning? Doing so, many are coming to believe, might shed new light on some of most intractable questions in current debate about school change. THE CIVIL War newspaper was a great idea, Pedro Bermudez knew, to try with his social studies classes at Turner Technical Arts High School in Miami. He had picked it up a couple of years before from a New York colleague at a workshop on assessment, and as he tried out unit - getting students to research, write, edit, and produce factual and opinion pieces about Civil War - he recognized its potential for bringing together rigorous content knowledge and practical workplace skills that Turner Tech emphasizes. Over two years, as he and a colleague adapted unit into a yearlong interdisciplinary course, he sometimes showed his students' work to a small group of teachers who met regularly at Turner Tech. Though his fellows came from different fields, they had worked out common ideas about good teaching and, Bermudez says, served as sounding boards to support and challenge one another. But with a teaching load of more than 170 students, he worried, could he really manage to evoke level of thoughtfulness and degree of career preparation for which he aimed? outsiders took a look at evidence his dream course produced, just how well would it stand up? In January 1998 Bermudez got his chance to find out. On a snowy Boston weekend, he gathered with 100 other educators who are members of Annenberg Institute for School Reform's National School Reform Faculty to present a large binder that displayed assignments, actual student work, and reflections on course's evolution and to ask for his colleagues' thoughtful appraisal of his progress. Using a carefully orchestrated feedback protocol, a small group of peers (many of whom Bermudez did not know) reviewed context and details of his work and offered him both warm support and tough critiques. He left not only with new confidence, energy, and ideas, Bermudez says, but with a conviction that showing his work to outsiders for feedback had stimulated important growth in his teaching practice. And he saw new potential in work of his collegial group back home. If you did this regularly with people you work with, he says, the responsibility could shift away from administrators evaluating teachers and toward colleagues holding each other accountable. The Portfolio as an Improvement Tool How do teachers show - or even know - how well they are doing? Faced with staggering teaching loads and students more diverse than at any time in history, how do they chart improvement in their own classroom skills as well as their students' progress? How can they measure their own content knowledge or subtle development of fine professional instincts? In this time of sanctions and salary incentives, of tests upon imposed tests, these questions are haunting thoughtful educators like Bermudez who care about how well they work with students at center of their lives. Teachers have recently sought an answer in very arena they know best - classroom - where, for last decade and more, innovative teachers of everything from writing to mathematics have been asking students to assemble evidence of their work in portfolios as a more authentic way to measure it against standards. What if, these educators have asked, we too presented portfolio evidence of our own learning and growth? What if we tried to show in concrete ways how that growth affects student learning? Doing so, many are coming to believe, might shed new light on some of most intractable questions in current debate about school change. …
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