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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Enlightenment, not Evaluation
In part, the protocols added useful rigor to a review whose intent was enlightenment, not evaluation. These discussions, some outside observers noted, had the air of professional meetings--in which, say, a group of doctors, lawyers, or architects puzzle over a case together--or of independent graduate seminars, in which teachers can explore their deepest concerns and interests. As each group pushed toward a deeper reading of the evidence, the learning extended beyond addressing the portfolio's framing question to sharpening the inquiry skills of every participant.
But that very developmental emphasis does bare the portfolio maker's vulnerabilities, which some professionals will consider doing only with a group of trusted colleagues. And as policy makers and administrators around the country eye the professional portfolio as a means of evaluating teachers and principals, many of these pioneers in the process worried openly about the effects that could have.
For most, the voluntary nature of this portfolio made it far more meaningful than if it merely fulfilled a school system requirement. "My job was not in jeopardy if I didn't do it," says Rhode Island teacher Carolyn Skaggs. If it were, she adds, "I probably would have gotten very good at churning out stuff. This was really just for me."
In Kentucky, which enforces its standards-based Education Reform Act with high-stakes measures for students, teachers, and schools, Erin Schneider's group of critical friends drew on the state's emerging list of teaching standards in preparing their professional portfolios. The experience might come in handy, they realized, if Kentucky used portfolios to evaluate and reward teachers in years to come. Still, the personal nature of this project was "a relief," Schneider says, after the high-stakes, evaluative context to which she and her colleagues have become accustomed. "I pushed myself a lot to make the portfolio worthwhile, but I didn't need someone giving me a grade on it. Our state accountability is so specific and tight and frustrating. It takes over everybody's mindset." If teachers could instead use NSRF-style portfolios to demonstrate learning and growth in the key areas of Kentucky education reform, she observes, "it would balance that out, instead of having charts or evaluation forms that only tell what you don't do. We could be pushing ourselves in a less threatening, less degrading way."
For Chris Louth, a veteran teacher at a high school in New York's Hudson River Valley, the portfolios represented a way to achieve consistency in the way members of her CFG--its principal audience, in her view--work with one another. "A lot of people in the group are very experienced professionals," she says, "and none of us were particularly interested in getting national certification." Instead, the group uses portfolios in conjunction with peer coaching "to inform our work together as we look at student work and at our own practice." Even setting "standards" for their portfolios, as if they were to evaluate one another, made this group uncomfortable, she observes; members simply prepare their portfolios according to simple guidelines, then use the same methods to discuss them that they regularly use in looking together at student work.
"The more you legislate, the less likely you are to get very deep reflection," Louth asserts. "From all my work with students, I see what happens when you're jumping through somebody else's hoops." She fears that the state board of education will sap the power of professional portfolios, in fact, by trying to use them as an accountability mechanism. "I would hate to see a creative, analytic act that really pushed my thinking become just one more annoying, meaningless requirement layered on," she says. "No one has made any real strides in freeing up teacher time in really effective ways, either to show evidence of student learning or to think about their next steps. And it's going to get reduced to 'What's the least possible I can get away with here?'"
Still, many of these educators said they would welcome the chance for colleagues or others in the school community to assess their portfolios. "I've worked too darn hard on this not to have it evaluated," says Chicago teacher Peggy Murphy, who would like to see "hard-nosed, rubric-based peer evaluation" of NSRF portfolios based on common criteria or such questions as "How does my practice impact student learning?" If people shared the same framing question from the start, Murphy asserts, they could compare the quality of various portfolios and could emerge from presentations with a real sense of mutual accountability, not just a pat on the back.
As a principal in Ithaca, New York, Dave Lehman says he is now "more convinced than ever that a professional portfolio is the way to go" in his own evaluation by district supervisors. "It provides a much more authentic, more complete picture on which I could be evaluated," he says. Moreover, he suggests, when different kinds of people in a school community all present portfolios, an "emerging connectedness" results. In a "state of the school" presentation to the community, Lehman used portfolios as an accountability tool, along with the usual overheads and written documentation. At tables around the outer walls of the gym, teachers and students presented their work in progress in various forms, from written to digital or video portfolios. "We were all modeling for one another," he says.
If the developmental emphasis of the NSRF's portfolio process prompts such an array of responses, the more evaluative end of the teacher portfolio spectrum also has its problems, according to those who have tried both methods. As a middle school teacher in Queens in 1994, for example, Susan Howard-Bubacz came just shy of the necessary score for certification when she prepared a portfolio for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards during its early field tests. Much more strictly controlled than the NSRF portfolio process, that program required an hour-long videotape of her actual teaching and a prescribed number of portfolio pieces to serve as evidence that she met the National Board's standards. In addition, candidates endured a rigorous two-day testing period including interviews and on-demand handwritten essays.
Though the National Board's high-stakes approach proved "hard to swallow," Howard-Bubacz says, it did have its advantages. For one thing, strict length limits forced her to scrutinize each portfolio artifact for its quality and effectiveness, averting the unwieldy aspects of the NSRF portfolio she later prepared as a CFG coach. She also praises the National Board's videotape requirement, saying that it helped her grow as a teacher. "But I would worry about using a process like that as a formal teacher evaluation," she says. "It would be very easy to hold back a wonderful teacher who didn't have the sophisticated skills it takes to compile a persuasive portfolio." In New York, the teacher union supports the right of tenured teachers to choose portfolios as an alternative to conventional evaluation, but Howard-Bubacz has seen few colleagues make that choice.
And though the National Board does ask teachers to use a collegial process as they prepare portfolios, Howard-Bubacz says she only learned what that meant after she went through the NSRF training to coach her current CFG. "Sure, I took my Board portfolio to my teaching buddies and asked their opinion," she said. "And maybe they would point out a punctuation error in paragraph three. But we didn't know how to really apply the rubric to the work together, or to do the kind of hard collaborative work that the CFG is about."
Can Teacher Portfolios Help Change Schools?
Most of the 100 educators who participated in these first marathon sessions of sharing their NSRF portfolios say that they went home with a sense of personal satisfaction, sometimes even exhilaration, from what they had learned. "Teaching is a strange profession," observes Eric Buchen, who teaches music in Torrance, California. "We don't necessarily build a tangible thing." The portfolio, he suggests, gives teachers "a tangible summation of what you are, what you do, and why you do it. It forces me to constantly and consistently look at what I'm doing, making sure that what I'm doing is good--for students and for me--and to improve. You can't stay stagnant." He realized, for one thing, "how much reading I do and how that's benefited my teaching--and it made me want to do more."
Can such an experience matter on a larger scale, both in the classroom and in the system as a whole? Perhaps not, if it remains a purely personal record of professional development. But if the portfolio emerges from the shared work of a vital critical friends group, as many did, it seems to carry that potential. For example, as Buchen relates, "The observations we did through our CFG were in my portfolio." So were his changing lesson plans--a "work in progress" shaped by the comments of group members and by books and articles read through the CFG. His own selection of materials to include was not driven largely by the standards at which the group arrived, he says. But the interactions within the group itself -- "meeting, talking with each other, supporting each other, proving to ourselves that what we were doing was valuable or valid" -- did have a powerful effect.
After almost 30 years of teaching, Shaun Armour found that his involvement in a CFG at his Colorado high school "breathed new life" into his practice, and he was eager to use the portfolio process as a source of new insights. "With five or six years left in my teaching career, I still need to set goals, to do something tomorrow that is different and better than what I did yesterday," he says. "We lose a lot of quality people in education because they don't see the opportunities for growth in our profession."
Portfolios would also make a good way to engage local community audiences, Armour believes. "At least in our part of the country, educators are not very popular right now with the media," he says. "We are being criticized by people who don't understand what we're doing. They fight us without knowing what we're all about."
Addie Hutchison, the chairman of a New Hampshire school board who lent her outside perspective to the NSRF portfolio conference, also came away wishing that more people in positions like hers could see teachers presenting their work this way. When she hires or promotes a teacher or administrator, she says, "I want people who know what they're doing and are always looking at how to take it another step, to keep it alive, to make it better." "Clearly, portfolios could provide our district with a very effective staff development tool contributing to teacher reflection and growth," says Virginia McElyea, the assistant superintendent for high schools in Phoenix, Arizona and another "outside colleague" who sat in on the NSRF portfolio presentations. Her district is also exploring how portfolios might be used, in combination with mentoring, as a performance-based means of evaluating teachers new to the profession.
NSRF leaders clearly hope that, whatever the uses of professional portfolios, they will be seen not as an end in themselves but as an ongoing tool in a practice that includes routine opportunities for thoughtful reflective dialogue throughout the school community. Rather than complicating teachers' lives, they imagine, portfolios could simplify them, by training attention on the learning for which all teaching activities should aim.
And though the pioneers who presented their portfolios sometimes tied themselves up in knots as they worried over their debuts, most ended up like Pedro Bermudez on his way back to Miami, with renewed faith in the power of a collaborative professional practice.
That teacherly sense of enhanced efficacy may prove to be exactly the right means to boost student achievement. A clear and consistent theme in recent educational research literature has been the relationship between teachers' reported sense of efficacy--or their ability to work successfully with their students--and positive student outcomes. So as the NSRF continues to grow, its leaders are keeping close tabs on whether preparing and presenting a professional portfolio--especially in the context of a supportive working group of colleagues--can affect these teachers' crucial sense of their ability to achieve good results.
On line both in the cafeteria and over the Internet, schoolpeople who have tried the process are already creating a data bank affirming that portfolios can have such a positive effect. "What about the simple idea that each one of us is trying to improve his or her practice just a little?" asks Philadelphia principal Michael Patron in an e-mail exchange among NSRF members. "We pick one or two questions that are important to us and search for better answers. This process is one of groping, trial and error, and mistakes. We document our struggles so that we know what actually worked and so that we can appreciate how far we have come. We share our documentation so that others can learn from our mistakes as well as from our successes. We make this process as public as possible to create a public, professional discussion about quality in the teaching profession. We all go away having learned something which will make us better teachers."

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