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What are the stages in portfolio development?

You have already made progress in several stages of portfolio development. As should be clear from the information that you have covered the stages are not purely linear as is suggest below. The steps are linked and can be revisited many times in the process of putting together the portfolio. However the setting out of the stages, as they are below, assists in making sure that all the relevant aspects have been covered. The stages in portfolio development are:

• deciding the purpose;
• determining your philosophy and goals;
• building and refining the portfolio;
  • selecting the content
  • reflecting on the content
  • refining the content to make it represent who you are
  • executive summaries
• framing the contents for presentation
  • paper, multimedia or online approach.

Determining your philosophy and goals

We have already considered the purpose for the portfolio so we will move directly onto determining your philosophy and goals. It is in this section that the use of a personal/professional journal would be very useful. The questions and points of reflection contained below could be used as entries into the personal/professional journal. If you have decided that the purpose for your portfolio is self assessment and learning then you may want to start the exploration of your personal philosophy with a presentation of your personal history of development and reflections on experiences and practices. This may include more than your professional development to include personal experiences that have assisted in the shaping you as a person. Some of the most important value and character shaping experiences are from outside our professional framework but they are reflected in the way we shape our professional lives and our professional values.

Activity

Take the time to write down a personal and professional developmental timeline and reflect on the following questions:

• What has been the impact on me of these personal and professional experiences?
• What have I learnt from the experiences?
• What has been the impact on my values and how I approach my teaching?

With the developmental timeline written it will also be a useful guide if you decide to take the archive approach to a portfolio and will provide ideas about what type of content and reflection may be useful. Following completion of the developmental timeline you have made progress towards the next step in the portfolio development - the philosophy and professional goals. Your professional philosophy and goals will flow out of who you are as a person and will revolve around you personal values as they are reflected in the teaching and learning process and will at least in part reflect teaching standards.

Activity

To assist you with the development of your professional philosophy you might find it useful to answer the following questions:

• What is knowledge and knowing?
• What is learning - especially for HSC students?
• What is the learning process?
• What is teaching - especially for the NSW HSC?
• What is the teaching process?
• How is my understanding of knowledge and knowing reflected in what and how I teach?
• What is assessment?
• How do my assessment practices reflect my understanding of the learning and teaching processes?
• What are the roles of the NSW HSC teacher?
• How does what I do in my teaching roles reflect what I believe about the learning and teaching processes?
• How do I organise my teaching?
• What classroom processes do I use?
• What are my behaviour management practices?

Having answered these questions you are in a better position to analyse what you think, believe and do. This then provides a point of reflection. It is in this section that a collaborator or mentor can be of great assistance as we all find it difficult to isolate what we say and what we actually do. Ask yourself or you and your collaborator or mentor the following questions:

• Does what you do in the classroom actually reflect what you believe about the teaching and learning? If not, what do you think is the basis of the inconsistency?
• Are my classroom processes and behaviour management practices consistent with my beliefs about the nature of learning and teaching? If not what do you think is the basis of the inconsistency?
• Are there other questions or inconsistencies in what you believe and what you do in the classroom situation?

In undertaking this activity you will have developed a good understanding of your ‘real’ educational philosophy and you may have also started to develop ideas about the goals that you want to work upon. This will be particularly the case if the purpose for the development of your portfolio is personal learning. However you may also want your portfolio to reflect fundamental requirements for proficient teaching or the key principles that underlie practice. The American National Board for Professional Teaching Standards 2001, maintain that the fundamental requirements for proficient teaching includes, among other things:

• knowledge of the subjects to be taught, of the skills to be developed and of curricular arrangements and materials that organise and embody that content;
• knowledge of general and subject specific methods for teaching and for evaluating student learning;
• knowledge of the students and human development;
• skills in effectively teaching students from racially, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse backgrounds; and
• skills, capacities and disposition to employ such knowledge wisely in the interests of the students.

The American National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has refined this broad framework into five propositions:

1. teachers are committed to students and their learning;
   • recognise individual differences in their students and adjust their practices accordingly;
   • have an understanding of how students develop and learn;
   • treat students equitably; and
   • teaching extends beyond developing the cognitive capacities of students.
2. teachers know the subjects they teach and how to teach those subjects to students;
   • appreciate how knowledge in their subject is created, organised and linked to other disciplines;
   • command a specialised knowledge of how to convey a subject to students; and
   • generate multiple paths to knowledge;
3. teachers are responsible for managing student learning;
   • call on multiple methods to meet their goals;
   • orchestrate learning in group settings;
   • place a premium on student engagement;
   • regularly assess student progress; and
   • are mindful of their principal objectives;
4. teachers think systematically about their practice and learn from experience;
   • are continually making difficult choices that test their judgement; and
   • seek the advice of others and draw on educational research and scholarship to improve their practice; and
5. teachers are members of learning communities;
   • contribute to school effectiveness by collaborating with other professional;
   • work collaboratively with parents; and
   • take advantage of community resources.

The American National Board for Teaching Standards approach to establishing the requirements for proficient teaching is not the only approach available Shulman 1987, suggests seven areas that need to be covered. You will note that there is considerable overlap between the approaches. They are clearly trying to ‘get at the same thing’. Shulman’s categories are:

• content knowledge;
• general pedagogical knowledge;
• curriculum knowledge;
• pedagogical content knowledge;
• knowledge of learners;
• knowledge of educational contexts; and
• knowledge of educational ends, purposes and values.

Activity

• Read and reflect on the frameworks and propositions presented above. Are there additional aspects that you would like to consider? Is there another approach that you would like to use for presenting the requirements of proficient NSW HSC teaching?
• Write down the framework that you would like to use to examine the requirements of proficient NSW HSC teaching. Against each of these requirements list examples of times or situations in which you demonstrated the requirement. These examples form the basis of the folio/portfolio so it is helpful to develop this as fully as you can.
• Reflect on your list – were you able to think of suitable examples? Were your examples clustered in one area more than another? What does the pattern of your examples say about your strengths and the areas that may require further development?
• Use the information that you have developed about your personal/professional philosophy and the requirements for proficient NSW HSC teaching and develop short and long term goals for your teaching. These goals will at least in part be determined by the purpose of the portfolio. If the portfolio is for personal learning and development them the goals developed are likely to be more personal than if the goal is promotion where the portfolio will demonstrate excellence in teaching. Your collaborator or mentor will be able to assist in the clarification of your goals.
• In determining your goals you should not feel restricted to the teaching standards outlined above. These may to too restrictive for your purposes and you may have broader goals that come more directly out of your personal philosophy.
• Once you have developed the goals you will need to plan how you are going to reach those goals. Once again your collaborator or mentor will be helpful with this process.

Building and refining the portfolio

At this stage you have determined the purpose of your portfolio and have at least begun to examine your philosophy, what constitutes the requirements for proficient NSW HSC teaching and determined your goals. It is now time to actually build the portfolio. The actual contents of the portfolio were, at least in part, determined when you developed a list of examples that illustrated how you meet the requirements of proficient teaching. The examples illustrating how you meet the requirements of proficient NSW HSC teaching are the backbone of the portfolio content. You now need to work on refining and reflecting upon the examples so that the content of the portfolio actually reflects you, your personal/professional philosophy, what you have achieved and your goals for the future. If you are developing an electronic portfolio you will need to focus on gathering multimedia materials to include and the sequencing of these materials for the best presentation of the material.

Activity

• Revi

The range and variety of material that can be included in a portfolio is really only limited by the imagination. Some possibilities provided by Matin-Kniep 1999 include:

• a learning styles inventory of students and accompanying activities that show how you address multiple learning styles;
• letters from parents that show appreciation for your efforts and responsiveness to a child’s needs;
• an outline of professional development activities and an explanation of how these activities have been used in the development of your teaching;
• a videotape of classroom activities using cooperative learning to show how you organise group instruction;
• learning units that incorporate curriculum requirements plus pre and post assessments;
• photo journals that depict your classroom activities for a month showing the range of instructional approaches and classroom activities that you used;
• letters from students who have struggled but who end the year having reached high levels of achievement as a testimonial to your teaching effectiveness;
• grades achieved by your students in the HSC examinations as a further evidence of your teaching effectiveness;
• case examples of students, which includes a profile of the students background as well as an analysis of their learning over time as seen in three to five work examples;
• artwork that depicts the variety of media used with students; and
• graded student’s samples that show your expertise as an assessor and feedback provider.

Now that you have developed a full working folio is time to extract the material that you need for the development of a portfolio for a specific purpose. The question now becomes which of the materials that I have collected in my working folio will best represent what I want to say about my teaching and myself. Once again you need to identify the purpose of the portfolio. Generally a portfolio for promotion purposes only has a limited number of examples which are selected to illustrate the achievement of the promotion criteria. The number is usually somewhere between five and ten individual items. These items need to be complementary to one another. They should not cover the same aspect of your teaching but each present a different understanding and together present the picture that you want to create. Asking the following questions may help when deciding what to include:

• What do I want my portfolio to say about me as a NSW HSC teacher? What are my best attributes as a teacher?
• What do I want my portfolio to say about me as a learner and the future directions for my development?
• How can I show the effect of my teaching on my students?
• What would including this item add that has not already been said or shown?

When developing a portfolio for presentations you need to consider developing the contents around a theme. The theme then also provides the guide to the material that is selected form the folio.

Framing the contents for presentation

As was mentioned in an earlier section the portfolio can be presented in paper or electronic form. You may have already made a decision about how to present your materials and indeed you may have already begun to put together your folio in one of the two main forms. Whichever form you decide upon the sections contained within it will remain substantially the same. There are generally several sections to a portfolio for career development. The sections include:

• Identification page
• Introduction
• Table of contents
• Statement of personal philosophy and goals
• Teaching standards or areas being addressed
  • introduction or summary
  • example/s
  • reflective statement on each example
• conclusion, resources, references

The identification page needs to contain, name, address and contact details. It can also include a photograph.

The introduction provides an overview of the portfolio’s direction and theme. The introduction should be about 250-500 words and it needs to set the scene for the portfolio.

The statement of philosophy and goals can be included as a separate section as indicated here or as a part of one of the criteria being addressed, for example in a criteria that illustrates you as a learner.

Each teaching standard or area to be addressed will be contained in separate sub section and these form the bulk of the portfolio. Each teaching standard or area will need to be introduced with a summary or a rationale associated with the standard or area.

You need to consider the general framing of the portfolio, that is, the graphics, colour, type size and so forth that can be used. This is particularly the case if you are using an electronic presentation where the range of possibilities is far greater than for a folder and paper version.

There are several stages to the development of an electronic portfolio. Initially at least some of the documents will be stored in paper version and some may be on videotape or audiotape. All the materials are then converted to a digital file format using word processing, image and possibly audio applications and stored electronically on a hard drive or floppy disk or LAN server. The materials are then entered into a structured format such as a database or onto presentation software such as Microsoft Power Point and stored on a hard drive, Zip disk, floppy disk or LAN server. The materials can then be translated to HTML, complete with hyperlinks between the teaching standards, examples and reflections using a web authoring program and transferred to a WWW server or organised in digital format and pressed to a CD ROM.

If you want to develop the portfolio into an electronic version many of the steps are still the same as if you were to present the portfolio in paper version. You still need to determine the purpose for the portfolio and the criteria that are going to be addressed but you will need to consider the resources that you have available for the development of an electronic portfolio. This will include an assessment of the hardware and the software requirements and the technical skills needed. You will also need to consider the availability of ancillary equipment such as digital cameras, scanners and microphones. You may need to identify staff development needs at this stage.