I’m still thinking about the conversation with a person about portfolios at her college. She says that the students are helped in their reflections since the college provides a worksheet. When she showed me the worksheet which was in thin columns – it asked for the evidence, what they thought was good and what improvements they can think of.
I realized that students have to have very small ideas to fit in the columns. Students were not asked what they had learned about the standard from their college experiences. They were encouraged to think of changes but without identifying what they had learned, I do not know how they could tell what they still needed to learn or change. They did not have the standard in front of them to identify which parts that have had success with and which parts they still needed to work on.
Do your students’ portfolio reflections represent in-depth thinking or surface comments?
Teacher Portfolios- Real Student Success or Faked Success?
Published March 26, 2009 Academic , Accountability , Achievement , Administrator , Assess , Assessment , Comment , Content , Data , Eportfolio , Evaluate , Portfolio , Proficient , Teacher 2 CommentsTags: Accountability, Achievement, Data, examples, Feedback, Portfolio, Proficient, Student, student work, Success, Teacher, work
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.