Individually, I talked to two teachers who had to present teacher portfolios and had received back comments on their portfolio. One teacher had glowing feedback. He told me how he had only put student material in the portfolio that demonstrated above proficient work. He explained that usually only one or two students in all of his classes had reached that level for each standard and so he included that work.
The other teacher had put in student work at all levels of proficiency. Her feedback focused on how she had to help students to be successful. She had included the percent of students at each level of proficiency; she had even included a graph for the proficiency rates on the four major standards. She indicated some strategies she had tried and whether each strategy succeed or did not succeed with these students.
The administrators were looking for measures of the teachers’ success in helping students to learn. They did not discern the difference between a staged or fake representation of success for a teacher and a teacher’s full disclosure about classroom learning.
How can your teacher portfolio show your growing success in reaching more and more students?
My book, Formative Assessment: Responding to Students, is available through Eye-on-Education.
That is a sad story! What was the point of that portfolio project? Apparently those teachers thought their jobs were on the line!
When I went to the assessment institute in Indianapolis last year I was skeptical about a teacher generated class portfolio project but was won over by the way that I heard schools rolling them out. When teachers were encouraged to examples of “before” and “after” work and explain the methods that made the difference and SHARE it with others, I thought it was inspiring and authentic.
Sean, I think your awesome!