Building Teacher Portfolios

Teachers and administrators in Connecticut are developing portfolios that are not only powerful professional development tools, but also often serve as substitutes for formal observation and evaluation.

In the Region 15 Public Schools in Middlebury, Connecticut, all students are learning to improve their performance through the analysis, reflection, and goal setting they do in their portfolios. Now teachers and administrators are using these strategies to improve teaching and learning. We are becoming a community of learners through our portfolio experiences. Here, a teacher reflects on her four-year learning experience in constructing what our district calls the "Educator's Collaborative Portfolio."

The Portfolio Journey Begins

The memo invited me to a meeting to talk about creating a teacher's portfolio. I thought about it for a while and found myself becoming intrigued. After all, I had worked with my students on portfolios for years, and I knew that making portfolios increased my students' understanding of themselves, their reading, and their writing.

At the time I had no idea that I was about to embark on a journey that would change the ways in which I teach and make decisions about instruction. My journey would take me through several different types of portfolios, help me to gain National Board Certification, and help me to become a classroom researcher as well as teacher.

My collaborator, Cynthia Bethancourt, and I began our work. Cynthia taught 5th and 6th grade students at Memorial Middle School, and I was an 8th grade language arts teacher at the school. In developing a focus question or idea, we decided to investigate strategies to improve the quality and accuracy of our students' self-assessment. We decided to collect a variety of instructional artifacts—our own work as well as that of our students. And so, our first year began.

We made a lot of mistakes that year: We collected too many artifacts; we didn't meet often enough to talk about what we were doing and why; and we didn't think about how we would deal with the mountain of things we had collected. As a result, we spent the week after school ended selecting items to include, editing hours of videotape, taking photographs of large projects, and writing a reflective essay about our process. When we finally finished, we had amassed two 3-inch-thick notebooks filled with a collection of student and teacher-made work. We were happy to be finished, but we weren't completely satisfied with our final product.

We began the next year much the same as the first. We kept the same basic question, expanding it to include goal setting. Again, we did not meet very often, and we still collected far too much. When we met at the end of the year, we decided to look at the portfolios that 12 of Cynthia's students had brought with them into the 6th grade. We selected students of various ability and motivation levels for our review. Then, we wrote lengthy case studies in which we noted the students' abilities to self-assess, self-evaluate, and self-regulate during the 6th grade.

Although time-consuming, the process was worthwhile because it forced us to have conversations about the individual students—Susie, who was in special education, and Jake and Jenny, who didn't always do their homework or care about making revisions. Our case studies were carefully written, accurate commentaries that focused on the students' work. When it came time to write our own reflective pieces, however, we seemed to have lost our momentum. Our reflections were flat and mechanical—discussing what we had done, but not what we had learned or what we planned to do next.

The Importance of Portfolio Reflection

Later that summer, I leafed through the massive volumes that Cynthia and I had completed. Though impressive in their size and breadth, they were lacking something. I was not satisfied with our planning or our reflective essays.

But the problem went deeper than that. Unable to identify exactly what was missing, I put the books aside and turned to the portfolios of my 8th graders. Somehow their work was far more satisfying to me than my own had been. As I analyzed their work, I began to see what was missing from mine.

I realized that Cynthia and I had spent a lot of time trying to prove something about ourselves as teachers, rather than working to improve our methods of instruction. We had left out the materials that showed what we had learned about our own instruction and the impact of that instruction on student work. Instead of a balanced portfolio showing our growth as educators, we had a collection of our best efforts. Instead of learning about ourselves and our teaching, we had shifted our focus to the students and celebrated their successes while ignoring less-than-successful lessons and students. I realized that my students learned the most about themselves and their progress by looking at representative samples of all of their work—the good, the bad, and the ugly. If my purpose for creating a portfolio was to improve and grow as an educator, then I would need to change my approach.

As I began my third portfolio, I was determined that things would be different. That year, the district offered us the opportunity to substitute the portfolio for the formal observation and evaluation process. I thought it was a good idea, but I was worried about my resolve to create a portfolio that demonstrated my growth as an educator. How would my administrator react to seeing evidence of those less-than-wonderful lessons? Would she give me a negative evaluation? Wasn't it a risky form of evaluation?

I talked with my administrator about my vision of the portfolio and the impact it might have on my evaluation. She reminded me that the goal of evaluation in our district is to improve teacher performance, and she assured me that the portfolio I envisioned would be a far more powerful evaluative tool than any other because it would enable me to take charge of my own assessment. In essence, I would be doing exactly what we ask our students to do: self-assess, self-evaluate, and self-regulate.

Using the Portfolio as a Tool

I spent the next several days thinking about a new focus question. I had become intrigued by the factors that motivate students to take advantage of opportunities for revision. It always frustrated me that some students—often the most able of students—would settle for a mediocre product rather than expend the effort to revise the product and improve the grade. My collaborators and I found the right words for my focus question:Given the evident weaknesses in writing (as diagnosed through a review of student portfolios from 7th grade and an initial timed writing sample), how can we motivate and encourage students to improve their performance in persuasive and expository writing?

This question felt right to me, and it also supported Memorial Middle School's goal of improving student performance in writing.

Collect initial data on the quality of student writing by reviewing student portfolios from the previous grade and by asking students to write essays, to be scored with rubrics from the Connecticut Mastery Test.
Design and teach a series of minilessons using models of excellent writing, graphic organizers, student self-assessment, and peer review.
Chart all students' progress throughout September by collecting data on their timed writing scores.
Collect samples of writing from three selected students.
Collect data from the Connecticut Mastery Test administered in late September and compare it with the performance of the selected students on timed writing assignments.
Continue to teach minilessons and to collect samples of expository and persuasive writing.
Collect end-of-the-year timed writing sample and compare with September performance.
Analyze end-of-the-year student reflections for evidence about how students perceived the effectiveness of the strategies used to improve their writing.

Using Reflection as a Tool

Another area of difference this time would be the portfolio itself. The first two portfolios we made were overwhelming—not just for Cynthia and me, but for anyone who looked at them. Teachers would take one look at the massive tomes and say, "Oh, no! I could never do anything like that. How did you get it done?"

There had to be a way to make a portfolio more user-friendly. Again I turned to the work of my students and realized that our student portfolio system was powerful because of frequent acts of self-reflection. After discussing the benefits of reflection with my collaborators, I decided to use a reflective journal. Keeping a journal would probably accomplish a number of different goals for me. First, it would ensure that I didn't just collect a vast array of artifacts throughout the year and then try and figure out what to do with them the week after school was out. Second, it would help me to sustain a focus on my question and keep me engaged in finding ideas and data to address that question. Third, it would help me stick to my plan to meet with my collaborators once a month. Finally, it would help me engage in frequent self-evaluation and self-regulation.

I planned to describe successes as well as those strategies that were less than successful. In short, I thought, I will learn something about myself and my teaching, as well as about my students and their performance.

This story of my odyssey is representative of the stories of other teachers in Region 15 who have had similar experiences working on portfolios. We all struggled to invent a new way of examining our practices as teachers, and we have all come to similar conclusions about what it has meant to us personally and professionally.

So What Did We Learn?

Fred Farrell, social studies teacher at Pomperaug High School, puts it well:The students constantly are asked to assess their work and the work of their peers. Because this is such a valuable teaching tool, it makes sense that we as teachers assess our own teaching methods, too.

Each collaborative team reported extensively on what they learned by engaging in the portfolio process. We learned the art of reflection and the value of collaboration. We learned how to plan and evaluate instruction more effectively and completely. We learned that the goal of evaluation is to improve our teaching and the performance of our students. We learned that teachers can become researchers. In short, we became more conscious of what we do, why we do it, and the impact it has on our students.

The What? section of my portfolio included a collection of my writing assignments and assessment tools and the prewriting and writing work done by each of the three students I was studying. I kept just enough of these materials to show how the students and I had done our work.
The So What? section included both my analysis of the quality of the student writing and the connections I made between my materials and strategies and the students' performance.
The Now What? section included my recommendations for the adaptations I needed to make in the instructional materials and strategies to improve student performance even further.

My portfolio is valuable beyond how it will improve teaching and learning in my classroom because what I have learned from my study will be used both formally in districtwide professional development activities and informally in the conversations I have with my colleagues in Memorial Middle School and on the regionwide Portfolio Committee.

Teachers and administrators at Pomperaug High School have told us that their portfolios enabled them to work together to improve instruction and student performance. Many teachers commented on the impact the portfolio had in improving teaming and instruction. The portfolio of Linda Begin and JoAnn Wislocki, a social studies and English team, resulted in "better planning, improved connection between instruction and assessment, a change in grouping, and more effective use of 90-minute blocks of instruction."

Over the past four years, 68 teachers and administrators (out of a total of 310) have completed a portfolio in the Region 15 Public Schools. Collaboration is the key. In many cases, teachers work as equal partners on the construction of the portfolio. In other cases, one teacher is the primary researcher, and his or her colleagues act as a support system, offering technical help or suggestions.
Districts must provide time for such collaborations. Region 15 provides paid curriculum days both during the summer and during the school year; and, of course, teachers spend many hours of their own time studying student work and finding connections between teaching and learning. Goals 2000 funding supported the last three years of our work.
All teachers and administrators who have been involved in developing a portfolio do it for the powerful professional development experience it provides. Tenured teachers may also choose this portfolio as an alternative to the traditional strategies of clinical supervision with the permission of their primary evaluator.
Administrators learn how to support teachers finding ways to improve student performance. Region 15 administrators provide support to all teachers engaged in creating portfolios, and some administrators are actively engaged in the research focus of a portfolio. This year, a quarter of the administrators in Region 15 are developing their own portfolios.
Teachers developed many effective strategies for studying student work and discovered important connections between teaching and learning. Information provided by teachers' portfolios provides direction to the adaptations made in curriculum, instruction, and assessment throughout the entire region.
We have learned that the focus and scope of the research must be tailored to meet the professional development needs of the teacher. Our most recent portfolios are specific and limited in scope; they focus on a single teaching/learning episode, a short series of episodes, or year-long studies of a few students.

Region 15 encourages lifelong learning through self-assessment, self-evaluation, and self-regulation. The Educator's Collaborative Portfolio process gives teachers the opportunity to engage in learning activities similar to those our students experience—and in the process, improve student performance.