National School Reform Faculty

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

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What Constitutes a Teacher Portfolio?

The first teachers and principals who trundled their portfolios in briefcases and milk crates to NSRF conference sites in Boston and Los Angeles largely did so with their hearts in their mouths. Though many had test-flown their materials with their CFGs back home, this audience was less familiar--including not only NSRF colleagues from around the country but also interested outsiders from districts curious about this new accountability technique. What would they want to see? What would be "good enough" to show? Eager to make a good impression, many presenters over-prepared, working straight through the preceding vacation on portfolios that burst at the seams with goal statements and curriculum units, student work and teacher reflections, artifacts of every description.

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THE PORTFOLIO is a way for teachers
to wrestle with important questions.

Assembling the Portfolio

How (Really) to Assemble Your Portfolio

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In the "gallery" where the Boston participants' precious bundles stood on display for others to browse through, a videotape played continuously through its loop, showing an art teacher coaching students in the glass-blowing studio he had built at the school. On the wall a principal projected a "digital portfolio" that took visitors with a click of the mouse through a web-like array of hyper-choices. At round tables throughout the room, file boxes bulged with papers too inviting to resist and too lengthy to digest. Four-inch-thick binders with plastic pages sheathed photographs, artwork, and writing that entranced passers-by who sat down for a quick look. A closely typed analysis of data from two years of student writing assessments looked like a doctoral dissertation in its daunting rigor. No one had time to take it all in; everyone wanted to try.

If a typical portfolio among these did exist, it would be hard to find. Yet common elements did emerge: a connection to the CFG's goals and standards; evidence of both teacher work and student work; a central purpose, question, or focus; a clear desire to show professional growth. And while some portfolios came across as individual job-search tools or award ceremony displays, others presented heartfelt, even anguished explorations of unanswerable dilemmas. Their personalities stood out like faces in a school auditorium, distinct and unique. That range materialized, NSRF leaders say, precisely because portfolios are not the ultimate aim for members of a CFG; rather, they are a tool that frames the group's real purpose, which is improving the work of teachers and students. "One could think of the CFG as a work group and the portfolios as its exhibitions," suggests Gene Thompson-Grove, who co-directs the NSRF.

Ideally, the portfolio exists "not to show me what a good teacher you are," asserts Teri Schrader, a teacher who has coached CFGs in two different schools, "but to talk about how you're thinking about your work." It provides an opening, she believes, for "a real question that you carry around with you all day. Maybe it's a deep suspicion that half your kids don't understand one word you're saying, or maybe it's a deep fear that you're afraid of kids. Or maybe it's a question like, 'How can we assess kids not just for skills and content, but for moral and ethical development?'" Any of those questions makes "a year's worth of work for a teacher to play with," notes Schrader, who has helped institute "process-folios"--renamed to emphasize their ongoing nature as a structure for both professional development and career advancement--in the school where she now is a lead teacher. And though personal reflection is "a given," the portfolio is not "soft words around soft work," she notes. "I want teachers to wrestle with important questions in their disciplines," she says. "It's a way to become more, notless, precise."

Presenting a 'Slice' of the Work

Partly because these portfolios did reflect such personal priorities, the manner of their presentation and critique took on particular importance. How could their authors prompt an audience to examine this evidence carefully and give useful and sensitive feedback?

The NSRF answer, again, drew on techniques first developed for the close scrutiny of student work in collaborative groups. Rather than asking the audience to look at the whole portfolio "cake," presenters were to offer only a "slice" of it--excerpting either a single section or a vertical segment taking bits from several sections--for critique in a two-hour session. Framed by a focusing question and a brief cover letter, this excerpt could provide documentation of the educator's development and offer insight into his or her current practice.

Further, the presentation would follow a carefully structured process of response, facilitated by someone trained in such discussions. First, members established norms for the coming conversations, which they knew could turn sour in a split second if they did not guard against inadvertent disrespect. Then they agreed on discussion "protocols" designed to create a sense of emotional safety for the presenter, at the same time encouraging new perspectives and probing critique. Though such constraints make many group members uncomfortable at first, these protocols have become a staple of NSRF practice in recent years as educators have used them to look together at students' and their own work. In the first portfolio critique sessions, participants and presenters alike credited the process with teaching them more than they expected to learn.

One of the protocols dictates that, at a certain point in the process, the presenter remain silent, listening and taking notes, while the group discusses his or her work. "Much of what we learn about our work through the protocols happens when we're eavesdropping on others thinking about the work," notes Colorado teacher and CFG coach Stevi Quate. Listening to people "making sense out of what already makes sense--or at least once seemed to make sense to us," she says, has even more value than hearing their final remarks.

"Something happens to me while I am playing fly on the wall," agrees California teacher Kathy Juarez. "I have the rare opportunity to hear people talking seriously about my questions--and I know I will get to think out loud about some of the issues they raise." Another teacher, Shaun Armour, says the protocol he chose forced him to "bite my tongue and listen" intensively to the feedback participants offered. "I have the ability to skew or change someone's opinion as we talk," he observes.

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