Portfolio

During the course of the year you will be putting together a teacher portfolio. This is an opportunity for you to reflect upon your development as a teacher. You are free to be as creative as you like and develop your own personal style for your portfolio.

For example you could create a blog-style portfolio over the course of the year where you add pictures, links to google documents with papers you have written, links to interesting articles, lesson plans etc. that you have discovered on the internet and personal reflections that you write in your posts;
or
you could create a 'treasure chest' of memorabilia from your year.

I am so looking forward to seeing what you all develop!

Some people in our class have asked me what they should hand in as their goals and objectives for their portfolios. Goals and objectives are due on September 25th.

In this post I want to give you a suggestion for structuring your thoughts. However this is only a suggestion and you are free to present your goals and objectives in your own way.

You could think about goals and objectives in each of the following areas:

professional development (becoming the kind of teacher you want to be - your vision);

teaching competencies (developing the skills you think you will need);

knowledge of children's learning (e.g. children construct their own learning within a social framework);

getting to know the children you aim to teach;

teaching in the science area;

and developing your own personal strengths that will contribute to your development as a teacher.

(These headings are adapted from a paper by Windsor 1995 p.72)

For each section you could think about the following questions:
What do you want to learn?
What do you expect to learn?
How will you go about reaching these learning objectives?
What evidence will you collect to demonstrate your development in each area?

To learn more check out the example and site given below.

"A teaching portfolio is the structured, documentary history of a set of coached or mentored acts of teaching substantiated by samples of student work and fully realized only through reflective writing, deliberation, and serious conversation. (p.64 Norma Lyons (1999) uses the above definition from an article by Shulman (1998)
(Lyons, N. (ed) (1998). With Portfolio in Hand : Validating the New Teacher Professionalism. New York: Teachers College Press).

In her paper about the usefulness of teacher portfolios (Nancy Coquard gives us an excellent example. She tells us about Connie Barr, a kindergarten teacher who struggled to come to terms with bringing technology into her kindergarten classroom. She gives us the following quote from an interview with Connie:
"Well, what amazes me is that I knew nothing - absolutely nothing. And I think that the whole fact of it is that I was terribly afraid of computers. Really, really afraid of them. And, once I got just a little taste, that’s when it happened. It was just like: ‘I can do this, you know, and maybe next year I’ll be able to do this.’ And I started making it sort of my objectives, for the year. I’ll add one more little skill so I’ll get a little bit better each time. And I move very slowly. My letters, I started with writing letters home to parents. How could I add a little picture with the parent letter." (Personal interview, October 22, 1990.

Connie set herself the goal of getting technology into the classroom. She used a teacher portfolio to help her. She set up her portfolio as a narrative journal within which she set goals and reflected on her evolving use of the computer skills she was slowly developing.

I am beginning a teacher portfolio for tracking my development as a teacher educator. I will bring my goals and objectives on Tuesday.
Carol