The three interns sitting around the table on the warm spring day had come to reflect on their experiences in constructing a teaching portfolio. The school year had just ended, and with it, their yearlong internship in the University of Southern Maine's Extended Teacher Education Program. The students had presented their portfolios, been deemed certified to teach, and were eager to take responsibility for classes of their own. They now sat beside their school-university mentors—partners in teacher education from both the university and the local schools that they had been assigned to.
Martha recalled the contents of their portfolios: We brought in our artifacts. Each was different, but our choices made sense for each of us.Anna, you brought in a unit on an integrated math and language arts project that you had done with your elementary students. You had worked on integrated units all year.Peg, you brought in the author's chair' you had created to go with a writing project you began with your kindergarteners and 1st graders.I, too, wanted to show the art work my high school students had done when they were reading The Scarlet Letter. I had them embroider the letter. I think artistic experience ought to be part of students' experience of reading literature. I included some samples along with student essays.
This gathering should have been a time to savor an achievement. But when asked what stood out for them in creating a teaching portfolio, the fledgling teachers seemed anything but satisfied. Martha, for example, recalled her initial reaction: We were asked to bring in one artifact that represented our growth as teachers. What could that be? And where did the standards fit in? Was the portfolio supposed to be a demonstration that we had met them? A tool for assessment? Or a record of our development?
Added Anna: What should the portfolio include? Someone suggested that we start with a statement of our philosophy. But I didn't have a teaching philosophy. At least I didn't think so.
She did, however, think the teams and mentors helped: I liked the fact that we three interns worked together and had the help of school faculty, administrators, and previous interns. It was important—and consoling—to hear how we all were struggling.
Raising State Standards
These interns' uncertainties reflected the very issues that the university and local school faculty had been grappling with. The three of them were participating in an experimental teacher performance assessment project that began three years ago. Sponsored by the Maine State Department of Education and funded by the National Association of State Boards of Education, the project's purpose is to engage teacher education institutions in guiding the state as it revamps its initial teacher certification process. (The two other schools involved are the University of Maine at Farmington and Bates College in Lewiston.)
State reformers had increasingly called for high and rigorous standards for beginning teachers, as well as requirements that these teachers demonstrate their ability to perform. Accordingly, the state asked each institution to come up with a standards-based model, leaving it to the three participating schools to develop their own standards and approaches.
The University of Southern Maine took up this challenge. Education faculty developed a set of 11 standards (see fig. 1) and made teaching portfolios mandatory for all interns. For the past two years, faculty members have been testing the standards and looking into appropriate modes of assessment, but they are wary of the pitfalls: can there be standards without mindless standardization?
Figure 1. Extended Teacher Education Program Outcomes
Excerpts from the University of Southern Maine's Teacher Performance Assessment Standards.
Demonstrates respect and concern for children, and an understanding of how they continue to develop and learn.
Understands the subject matter and makes accessible to students the discipline's tools of inquiry, central concepts, and connections to other domains of knowledge.
Consistently plans and evaluates instruction based on knowledge of the learner, the subject, the curriculum, the intended outcomes, and the community.
Understands and uses a variety of teaching strategies, including appropriate technology.
Enhances and documents learning through formal and informal assessment strategies.
Models respect for individual differences among students and coworkers.
Communicates his or her beliefs about learning, teaching, assessment, and the role of education in society.
Understands principles of democratic community and plans instruction to promote good citizenship.
Demonstrates responsibility to school and community.
Recognizes that he or she is, above all, a learner.
Understands and implements classroom management techniques that support individual responsibility and the principles of democratic community.
Although the three educational institutions developed their standards through different processes—questionnaires, surveys, and study—there is remarkable consistency among them, and also between their standards and national standards, such as those of the Interstate New Teachers Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC 1992). Like members of this consortium, the faculty members believed that standards should be the same for beginning and advanced teachers. They also considered developmental issues.
A School-University Partnership
The University of Southern Maine is an appropriate setting for taking up such issues. In addition to an undergraduate minor in Education, the Extended Teacher Education Program includes an intensive yearlong internship for liberal arts graduates that leads to initial teacher certification. (A follow-up program leads to a master's of science in education.) The internship takes place in an innovative fifth year professional development school.
In this teacher education model, the internship year is linked with five Maine school districts. All are members of the Southern Maine Partnership, a collaborative of school systems committed to school renewal and reform. All are engaged in some form of school restructuring. The districts include the Portland Public Schools, with its expanding urban population of immigrant students; Yarmouth Public Schols, a coastal district north of Portland; the coastal districts of Wells/Ogunquit and Kennebunk; the inland village of Gorham; and rural Fryeburg.
The internship program follows the school calendar. Interns arrive in August and spend the school year taking part in all activities of their assigned schools, gradually assuming full teaching responsibilities. In a unique partnership arrangement at each site, a school-based faculty member and a university faculty member work together as site coordinators and mentors to the interns. The local faculty hold adjunct faculty status at the university.
Portfolio contents address the program standards and the intern's personal vision of teaching. Materials include student work, teaching plans, photographs and videotapes, and accompanying reflections. At the end-of-year presentation, this evidence is reviewed with mentor teachers and site coordinators who, in caucuses, consider whether the intern is indeed ready to be certified. In this discussion, mentors bring their own knowledge of the student to bear on their decisions. Thus, as Moss (1994) puts it, "a community of interpreters considers the work of the intern as a whole."
During the 1994-95 school year, a class of 70 students in the Extended Teacher Education Program took part in the experimental assessment project. They were assigned to the five different school districts. Although the local schools went about each phase of the project in different ways, all used the portfolio presentation to peers and mentors as one factor in determining the intern's program completion.
Working Out the Issues
The first year of the teacher assessment project yielded an important finding: a broad body of evidence is needed to determine whether an intern meets the standards. The portfolio emerged as a powerful experience for students, but it was only one way of presenting their work. The faculty began moving toward a performance assessment system in which standards were linked to evidence and the portfolio became the organizing process to gather and present that evidence.
Carol Lynn Davis and Ellen H. Honan, site coordinators at Yarmouth Public Schools, describe the changing role of portfolios in their district: Portfolio presentations are shifting from celebratory end-of-the-year events to occasions where critical information can be offered, discussed, and considered as decisions are made about program completion. We are coming closer to the balance we seek.
At first, project faculty questioned whether performance assessments could serve both assessment and professional development, but they have resolved this issue. They see standards and performance assessments as part of an interconnected process, not as isolated elements. The shifting role of Yarmouth's portfolio team exemplifies this dual purpose: Portfolio teams—composed of interns, former interns, teachers, administrators, and university faculty—serve as coaches for portfolio development. The first year we thought of teams as compassionate listeners. Now we think of teams as critical friends. This year, as interns began presenting portfolio entries to their team, it became clear that critical response was in the best interest of the intern.
Evaluators use evidence of the intern's work and learning throughout the internship to evaluate performance, to observe the intern's developing vision of teaching, and to set new learning goals. Underlying this process is, as Shulman (1987, 1994) puts it, "a vision of teaching and learning."
Portland's faculty team, Rita Kissen and Deborah E. Keyes, wrestle with an emerging issue, one that is particularly pertinent to their district because Portland Public Schools is a federal relocation site for Asian immigrants: As a cohort of primarily white interns and mentor teachers, the Portland site faces a critical question: How do we teach' an understanding of diversity and ensure that our interns are able to translate this understanding into their classroom practice? Our experience has shown that while we may attempt to address these questions in an academic course, our interns' most authentic and powerful learning originates in and evolves from their own experiences as teachers working with their students.For example, the curriculum units the interns designed included a life science unit connecting biodiversity to human differences, a social studies unit exploring 8th grade students' stereotypes about Native Americans, and several literature units in which interns infused the study of the canon with works by minority authors.
Authoring One's Learning
The greatest significance of the performance assessment process may rest in the more active role of teacher interns. The process prompts the interns to take a new kind of responsibility for learning to teach, what is called "authoring" their learning. No longer do interns simply present a list of courses or grades for credentialing. They now must construct and present evidence of their mastery of learning to teach—their readiness to take responsibility for a class of learners.
Project coordinators for the Gorham School Department—Walter Kimball, Susie Hanley, and Patti La Rosa—describe how this transformation came about in their district: It occurred to us that program faculty were taking responsibility for telling an intern what his or her accomplishments had been. The form was grades and ratings. We now believe that we had the process backwards: It should be the intern who, with support, presents and justifies his or her learning to us. This insight led to the creation of a new process: now the intern gathers and presents for review a body of evidence for the purposes of certification as well as professional development.
In recalling her internship year, Martha illustrated how fruitful this theory can be in practice: After we presented a second portfolio entry, the whole project began to make sense. I didn't relax, but I could see where it was going. The whole year of learning to teach had seemed like a booming, buzzing in my head. Now I had to make sense out of it—consider a teaching philosophy. I began to think about times when my students had really responded to me, to what I was presenting to them, to learning. I decided that is what I would put into my portfolio.
Added Anna: I started looking at my students' portfolios. I was thrilled to find in them lessons and samples of the things we had worked on together. I decided that I would put samples of their portfolios into mine. And suddenly I could see that the portfolio was like a mirror. It was reflecting my teaching back to me. It was exhilarating, yet daunting: I never felt so revealed.
As the performance assessment project enters its last year, new issues continue to engage faculty and students. For example: How can a community of interpreters assure defensible judgments? Will standards and performance assessment make a difference to the new teachers and their ongoing development—and to their students? A new chapter opens.
