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Educators Making Portfolios
First Results from the National School Reform Faculty
by Kathleen Cushman
Phi Delta Kappan, June 1999

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WHAT IF educators presented portfolio evidence of their own learning and growth? What if they tried to show in concrete ways how that growth affects student learning? Doing so, many are coming to believe, might shed new light on some of the most intractable questions in the current debate about school change
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THE CIVIL War newspaper was a great idea, Pedro Bermudez knew, to try with his social studies classes at Turner Technical Arts High School in Miami. He had picked it up a couple of years before from a New York colleague at a workshop on assessment, and as he tried out the unit--getting students to research, write, edit, and produce factual and opinion pieces about the Civil War--he recognized its potential for bringing together rigorous content knowledge and the practical workplace skills that Turner Tech emphasizes.

Over two years, as he and a colleague adapted the unit into a yearlong interdisciplinary course, he sometimes showed his students' work to a small group of teachers who met regularly at Turner Tech. Though his fellows came from different fields, they had worked out common ideas about good teaching, and, Bermudez says, "served as sounding boards to support and challenge one another." But with a teaching load of over 170 students, he worried, could he really manage to evoke the level of thoughtfulness and degree of career preparation for which he aimed? If outsiders took a look at the evidence his dream course produced, just how well would it stand up? In January 1998 Bermudez got his chance to find out. On a snowy Boston weekend, he gathered with 100 other educators who are members of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform's National School Reform Faculty to present a large binder that displayed assignments, actual student work, and reflections on the course's evolution and to ask for his colleagues' thoughtful appraisal of his progress. Using a carefully orchestrated feedback protocol, a small group of peers (many of whom Bermudez did not know) reviewed the context and the details of his work and offered him both warm support and tough critiques. He left not only with new confidence, energy, and ideas, Bermudez says, but with a conviction that showing his work to outsiders for feedback had stimulated important growth in his teaching practice. And he saw new potential in the work of his collegial group back home. "If you did this regularly with the people you work with," he says, "the responsibility could shift away from administrators evaluating teachers and toward colleagues holding each other accountable."

The Portfolio As an Improvement Tool
How do teachers show--or even know--how well they are doing? Faced with staggering teaching loads and students more diverse than at any time in history, how do they chart improvement in their own classroom skills as well as their students' progress? How can they measure their own content knowledge or the subtle development of fine professional instincts? In this time of sanctions and salary incentives, of tests upon imposed tests, these questions are haunting thoughtful educators like Bermudez who care about how well they work with the students at the center of their lives.

Teachers have recently sought an answer in the very arena they know best--the classroom--where, for the last decade and more, innovative teachers of everything from writing to mathematics have been asking students to assemble evidence of their work in portfolios as a more authentic way to measure it against standards. What if, these educators have asked, we too presented portfolio evidence of our own learning and growth? What if we tried to show in concrete ways how that growth affects student learning? Doing so, many are coming to believe, might shed new light on some of the most intractable questions in the current debate about school change. Reflective scrutiny of the work of educators in portfolio form, for instance, might reveal something about how best to improve teacher practice, from the earliest to the latest points in their careers. Teachers making portfolios might also start to turn an impossible array of externally imposed standards into more powerful, personal measures that they would generate from their own work and carry in their heads every day. Finally, schoolpeople and the public might develop a common understanding, rooted solidly in local communities, of what success looks like as a school travels the long path toward its transformation into a culture of excellence for all.

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THE NSRF endeavor exemplifies a
grand experiment in "standards without standardization."
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An Audience of 'Critical Friends'

 

In 1995, a task force of the National School Reform Faculty (NSRF) challenged the 800 participants in its first 80 "critical friends groups" to pursue those very goals. The critical friends groups (CFGs) are made up of teachers and administrators who meet regularly with a trained "coach" to improve their practice, increase student learning, and hold each other mutually accountable for their professional work. Under the aegis of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, the NSRF has put its chief efforts since 1994 into creating and supporting such groups as a major strategy for systemic, whole-school reform.

During the two years from 1995 to 1997, NSRF leaders suggested, each CFG should arrive at standards for adult and student learning. Then, using the portfolio format many teachers already knew from their own classroom assessments, members of the group would be asked to present, examine, and reflect on their own work in the context of those standards.

Aside from the stipulation that each portfolio should be grounded in its own CFG's standards for excellent teaching and learning, these practitioners received little guidance about how their portfolios should look. Members of the NSRF do share a common language--they speak of "looking collaboratively at student work," of becoming "reflective practitioners," of turning schools into "learning communities." But the NSRF initiative rests on the belief that schoolpeople must construct their own learning from a cycle of experience and reflection, not from some outside expert telling them how to do their work better.

And precisely because they emerged from such a cycle--individual, local, idiosyncratic--the first 100 portfolios were as various as the individuals and groups involved when, in January and February 1998, their makers gathered in Boston and Los Angeles to present to one another their evidence of professional growth.

In that sense the NSRF endeavor exemplifies a grand experiment in "standards without standardization" at the teacher level--unlike, for example, the more prescriptive portfolio initiative of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and also unlike some districts' impulse to use portfolios as a means of evaluating and rewarding teachers. It aims to build a platform for collaborative, ongoing reflection and learning among teachers in school sites and among networks. And it does so not through a linear process ending in judgment or certification, but in a recursive fashion that is intended to yield both personal and school-level insights and to suggest "next steps" in a teacher's or faculty's professional development.

What did these first NSRF portfolios contain, and how did their makers go about deciding that and assembling them? Who constitutes their audiences, and what roles should those audiences play in responding to the portfolio? How can others--whether insiders or outsiders--assess a portfolio's thoughtfulness and rigor or its usefulness in improving teacher practice and student learning? What importance do teacher portfolios carry as a strategy for large-scale, systemic reform of schools and districts?

As members of the NSRF continue to collect, present, and reflect on their work together, they offer the beginnings of a theoretical framework for teacher portfolios and some practical guidelines for their construction and presentation. And they are beginning to ask new questions about the purposes, processes, and potential of this promising strategy for school reform.

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