The Value of Professional Teaching Portfolios to Prospective Employers: School Administrators' Views.
2005; Auburn University; Volume: 27; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2162-6618
Autores Tópico(s)Student Assessment and Feedback
ResumoThe purpose of this study was to assess administrators’ views in a mid-western state regarding the development of a job search portfolio for pre-service teachers. All pre-service teachers must complete the professional portfolio, a requirement for initial teacher certification, during the teacher preparation phase of the degree program. It is proposed that with input from administrators who hire beginning teachers that the professional portfolio can be modified/adapted for use as a job search portfolio. Subjects (n = 252) volunteered for this study by responding to a survey mailed to 675 state school administrators. Recommendations gathered from the study are provided. “An education student in her last month of residency recently went to her professor and said ‘You won’t believe what happened today! I showed my supervising teacher my portfolio and after looking through it for a few minutes, she put it under her arm and said let’s go. The principal must see this!’ She practically dragged me into the principal’s office and said ‘Look at this! I’ve been telling you we need to interview this student for our faculty. Her portfolio is outstanding.’ After looking at the portfolio for a few minutes, the principal scheduled an interview with me and requested that I bring my portfolio.” (Morgan, 1999, p. 416) Introduction More and more states now require demonstration in a teaching portfolio of an acceptable level of proficiency on a set of externally defined teaching standards as part of the initial teaching licensure process. However, even though teacher education programs may require their students to include evidence of proficiency on a recognized set of standards, there is much variation as to the types of artifacts selected or recommended to include in the teaching portfolios. This is true not only from one state to another, but can also be seen across teacher education programs within the same state. Much has been written about portfolios, their use in teacher education, and the need to consider their purpose when designing and implementing a portfolio program. The research on portfolios has primarily focused on the information that a portfolio provides about a teacher candidate, how portfolios should be structured and what they should contain (Vavrus & Collins, 1991; King, 1991; Shulman, Haertel & Bird, 1988). The use of the portfolio as a job search tool has been addressed less extensively. There is little research available that documents the extent to which portfolios are currently used by school administrators (Weinberger & Didham, 1987; Williamson & Abe, 1989). This limited research has shown that although school administrators express support for the use of portfolios in employment decisions, they tend to rate traditional hiring tools as more useful than the integrated performance measures. As the use of portfolios in teacher education program assessment increases, the need to modify portfolios for job searches increases as well. The full collection of material that may be required to reflect the elements of a professional education program portfolio will be too extensive for a building principal to find helpful in making a hiring decision. How can students make this transition from completing a professional portfolio used for teacher certification purposes to one The Value of Professional Teaching Portfolios Volume XXVII • Number 1 & 2 • Fall 2004 & Spring 2005 59 used in the job interviewing process? Simply put, what exactly should one include in a beginning teacher employment portfolio? Research Questions Three major questions were addressed in this study: 1. Do administrators use the portfolio in the hiring process? Why or why not? 2. What should be included in the job interview portfolio? 3. What type of portfolio format or presentation is most conducive for administrators’ use in the hiring process? Theoretical Framework Teaching Portfolios A portfolio is generally characterized by depth of learning. This notion of depth is evidenced by several authors who define a portfolio as: • The structured documented history of a carefully selected set of coached or mentored accomplishments substantiated by samples of a learner’s work and fully realized only through reflective writing, deliberation, and serious conversation (MacIssac & Jackson, 1995). • Being more than a container — a portfolio also embodies an attitude that assessment is dynamic and that the richest portrayals of teacher (and student) performance are based on multiple sources of evidence collected over time in authentic settings (Wolf, 1991, p. 130). • A fusion of processes and product. It is the processes of reflection, selection, rationalization, and evaluation, together with the product of those processes (Winsor & Ellefson, 1995, pp. 68–69). The ability to better understand the nature of an individual’s learning through the use of portfolios is enhanced through the development of teaching portfolios (Loughran & Corrigan, 1995). A teaching portfolio is defined as a structured collection of evidence of a teacher’s best work that demonstrates a teacher’s accomplishments over time and across a variety of contexts (Edgerton, Hutchings, & Quinlan, 1992). Kenneth Wolf (1991) declares, “Portfolios provide a connection to the contests and personal histories of real teaching and make it possible to document the unfolding of both teaching and learning over time” (p. 129). The teaching portfolio is seen as a more “authentic” form of teacher assessment (Barton & Collins, 1993) as well as a way to better capture the complexities of teaching and learning over time and across different contexts in authentic settings (Shulman, 1988). In addition, the teaching portfolio is intended to be a dynamic portrayal of teacher performance based on multiple sources of evidence (Valencia, McGinley & Pearson, 1990). And, finally, Brown and Wolfe-Quintero (1997) defined a teacher portfolio as “a purposeful collection of any aspects of a teacher’s work that tells the story of the teacher’s efforts, skills, abilities, achievements, and contributions to his/her students, colleagues, institution, academic discipline, or community” (p. 28). Currently, portfolios are being widely used across the country by teacher preparation programs to promote student learning, professional development, and reflection and to provide evidence for evaluation (Stone, 1998). Teaching portfolios in pre-service teacher education can be used as a way of encouraging student teachers to document and describe their skills and competence as a teacher. Portfolios have the potential of providing much richer information than do traditional assessment methods (Long & Stansbury, 1994). Results of the four-year Teacher Assessment Project at Stanford reported that engaging in the process of portfolio development appears to encourage teachers to become generally more reflective about their teaching practices (Vavrus & Collins, 1991). Mokhtari, Yellin, Bull and Montgomery (1996) reported in their study that when pre-service teachers maintain a portfolio of their work, they learn to assess their own progress as learners. In addition, Ford and Ohlhausen (1991) found that participation in the teaching portfolio process played a critical role in changing students’ attitudes, beliefs, and classroom practices related to alternative forms of assessment. Developing a portfolio can be difficult for pre-service teachers who are unfamiliar with this assessment process
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