NSW HSC Online Professional Development Node

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What is a teaching portfolio?

Teaching and learning are dynamic processes and the teacher has a personal as well as a professional history. The teacher makes adjustments, develops and learns during the process of teaching. The professional portfolio provides the contexts and personal histories of real teaching and make it possible to document the unfolding of both teaching and learning over time (Shulman, 1988).

A portfolio is based on the premise that it must reflect the richness and complexity of teaching and learning.

The portfolio enables teachers to portray, assess and improve upon their work it provides a description of a teacher's strengths and accomplishments and includes documents and materials which collectively suggest the scope and quality of a teacher's performance. The portfolios are fluid “even though they can freeze a moment and make it look as if it has a clear beginning and end. They are museums of our work and thinking – displaying our successes, experiments and dreams” (Martin-Kniep, 1999).

This professional development node is designed to take you through the process involved in developing a professional portfolio so that if you follow the steps involved you will have as a minium a working portfolio. There is a lot involved in this process. However don’t be put off developing a portfolio, this site will take you through all the information that you need. If you can find some time each week (or more often if you are able) for reading, thinking, planning and acting then not only will you learn a great deal about your teaching but you will also have a product that richly portrays you as a reflective, developing professional.

Activity

I suggest that at this point that you read all of the material about portfolios and the activities that are contained in the following sections so that you have an overall idea of what is involved. Some of the questions that are contained in each section are also informed by the insights that are contained in later sections so an overall grasp of what is required will assist in the process. Some of the thinking will be cyclical in that you may come back to the same point in the process more than once. Understanding some of the issues involved and the decision to be made from the outset of the development process will help to smooth the way.
It would be a good idea if you have a means of taking notes, recording reflections, jotting down ideas and recording the decisions that you make as you work your way through this material. The notes will assist you when it comes to putting your ideas together. You may want to use a personal/professional journal for this purpose.
There are many ways to develop a portfolio and one of them is to use a multimedia approach. There are some examples of these that have been developed as web pages. At this stage it would be a good idea to have a look at a few examples that exist on the web. Do a web search on professional teaching portfolio using one of the major search engines such as ‘google’ or ‘altavista’. I do not want you to make any judgement about the portfolios that you may find on the web. The idea at this stage is for you to begin to ‘get a feel’ for what a portfolio can look like and what it can contain. Use what others have done, how they have presented their ideas and what they have included in their portfolios as a stepping stone, as something to stimulate your ideas and imagination. Remember there is no one way to develop a portfolio, all are individual as they are developed for different purposes and about different people who have different circumstances. Make your portfolio a reflection of you, your teaching and professional development.

Hopefully, now that you have seen some sample portfolio, your thinking about the possibilities for portfolio structure, what can be included as content and the presentation of the portfolio will have been stimulated. As stated earlier there are no set or hard and fast rules when it comes to the development of a professional portfolio. All aspects of the portfolio need to be guided by the purpose behind the portfolio development.