Teacher Portfolios for Evaluation: A Great Idea or a Waste of Time?

Writer(s): 
James Dean Brown & Kate Wolfe-Quintero, University of Hawai'i at Manoa

The current educational climate of curriculum revision and controversy over employment issues leads one to ponder what procedures could be mutually beneficial in regard to both institutional curriculum development and equitable teacher evaluation. In this article, Brown and Wolfe-Quintero suggest that development of teacher portfolios, as demonstrated at the University of Hawai'i, can help institutions recognize and employ a teacher's abilities and also add to the satisfaction and security of the teacher.

In language programs around the world, important decisions are regularly made about the lives of language teachers: (a) hiring decisions; (b) decisions about whether the teacher's work has been satisfactory; (c) staff retention or cut-back decisions; and (d) decisions about promotions and raises. Typically, such decisions are based on student opinions as expressed in course evaluation questionnaires, administrator input in the form of classroom observation feedback, and teacher information provided in an updated resume. These three types of information along with others (see Long, 1994) can be valuable, but may not be sufficient for making reliable and valid decisions about a teacher's relative strengths and weaknesses. After all, student evaluation questionnaires can turn into mere estimates of a teacher's popularity, while administrator observations of classrooms are often just a kind of snapshot of what really goes on day-to-day in that same classroom, and a teacher's resume is just a cryptic outline of the facts about a real person who has other traits and abilities that are not reflected in those cold facts.

At the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (UHM), we recently introduced a new teacher portfolio component to the teacher evaluation procedure which is an integral part of the curriculum of the Hawai'i English Language Program (HELP). Kate Wolfe-Quintero first suggested using teacher portfolios in the English Language Institute at UHM in 1994 and at HELP in 1995. In separate developments, Shira Smith had earlier suggested (in 1994) using portfolios as part of teacher evaluation in the New Intensive Course of English (NICE) at UHM (Smith, unpublished manuscript).

Teacher portfolios are a relatively new idea in the general education field (for instance, see Anson, 1994), and, as far as we know, using portfolios as part of ESL/EFL teacher evaluation is also relatively new. We would like to share with readers of The Language Teacher what we learned from introducing this process at UHM.

What is a portfolio? Traditionally, architects, artists, and models have used portfolios to present work samples that demonstrate their skills and achievements to potential employers. Recently, the idea of portfolios has been introduced to teaching in general and language teaching in particular as a way of having students collect and display their work and their reflections on that work. As Wolf (1989, p. 37) put it, student portfolios function as "biographies of works, a range of works, and reflections." Drawing on the literature for student portfolios, we tentatively defined a teacher portfolio as a purposeful collection of any aspects of a teacher's work that tells the story of the teacher's efforts, skills, abilities, achievements, and contributions to his/her students, colleagues, institution, academic discipline, or community.

What might a teacher portfolio contain? Given that a teacher portfolio should by definition contain anything that the teacher feels is appropriate, we would like to stress that the following list is only a set of suggestions or ideas for what teachers might want to consider including in their teacher portfolios at a particular institution. Individual teachers will probably not want to include all of these items, and may think of other items (not listed here) that they would definitely want to add.

To begin with, teachers should strongly consider including a cover letter. A cover letter can be used to reflect on and identify the purposes for the contents of the portfolio, as well as to show how the contents are organized and explain why they are organized in that way. In the long run, judicious selection and commentary on the material will make a much more powerful portfolio. Thus, an explanation of the selection process can help the reader understand that process and understand why selectivity is important.

Another item of content teachers should consider including is an updated resume. A well-written resume can present a great deal of detail about a teacher's background and qualifications in a very condensed and efficient way. Typically, resumes include at least educational background, work experience, and professional references. Conventional wisdom in business circles is that a resume should be short and easy to read. However, after talking with a number of colleagues who are involved in hiring, firing, and promotion decisions in academic circles, we feel that it is more important that teachers' resumes be complete than that they be short.

Information that teachers sometimes forget to include in their resumes includes: (a) details about their service to various language programs (for example, curriculum development, materials development, test writing, etc.) or to the field as a whole (for instance, conference presentations, offices held in professional organizations, etc.); (b) a listing of the variety of courses they have taught over the years (emphasizing the length and depth of professional experience); (c) highlights of any professional development they have gone through since finishing their formal education (for example, courses taken beyond the masters degree, workshops or conferences attended, etc.); and (d) other aspects of their lives like highlights of their foreign travel or experience living in other cultures, or lists of their conference presentations, their published articles, the foreign languages they speak, grants and honors they have received, and so forth.

More importantly, teachers should consider expanding and amplifying some parts of the resume elsewhere in the portfolio. For example, a teacher's conference presentations and published articles can be listed in a resume but only elsewhere in the portfolio does it make sense actually to include sample handouts from the presentations or copies of the articles. In fact, the samples (along with some reflection on them) may prove far more crucial than the resume itself. In other words, a complete resume may enhance a teacher portfolio, but the amplification and reflection on some parts of that resume may be even more important.

Teacher portfolios might also contain a statement of teaching philosophy. Such a statement could include discussion of the theoretical underpinnings that make up the teacher's belief system and how that belief system guides materials selection, teaching strategies, classroom management, and so forth. Such a statement of philosophy might also include an explanation of what the teacher actually does in the classroom, why doing things that way is beneficial for students, and how the teacher knows when teaching strategies are working well. In fact, any aspect of a teacher's professional philosophy can be included here, even ideas on teacher-student relations, the role of fun and humor in the classroom, the importance of songs, and so forth.

Examples drawn from numerous other aspects of a teachers life can also be included in a teacher portfolio. For instance, example syllabuses can be included along with an explanation of how they were created; example tests and a discussion of how the teacher does assessment and grading; example feedback sheets and a statement of how the teacher responds to students' work and provides feedback; or example materials the teacher has written and a statement of how the teacher creates materials. Notice that, in each case, we have suggested that the teacher not only provides the sample work but also a reflective explanation that illustrates how the teacher thinks about the sample. The teacher may also want to include a selection of students' teacher evaluations (or selected comments from them) along with an explanation of what these evaluations mean to the teacher (for instance, "These evaluations show X about my relationship with my students and Y about my teaching.").

Other items that teachers might want to include are examples of students' work, or letters of support, or thank you letters from students and colleagues, or pictures of classroom activities, or whatever they feel best represents their professional abilities and accomplishments. Naturally, each of these items should include some reflection on why they are interesting, important, and representative of their teaching personas.

Why do a teacher portfolio? Teachers can benefit substantially from developing a portfolio and adding that information to the teacher evaluation process. To begin with, portfolios allow teachers to present a rich array of the information that best represents their professional personas. The very process of developing a portfolio can help them to gather together their thoughts about their professional strengths and synthesize them into a cogent collage. And, portfolios also allow teachers to shape readers' perceptions by selecting the types of information that will be included and by presenting that information from their own point of view. Because of the reflective nature of portfolios, developing one inevitably enlarges a teacher's view of what teaching is. Such reflections should go well beyond traditional product-oriented views of teacher evaluation to promote a view of teaching that is developmental in nature; one that also considers teaching processes and teacher growth (for more on this topic, see Zubizarreta, 1994).

In short, a teacher portfolio can supply additional quality information not available from the traditional sources of student evaluation questionnaires, classroom observations, and teacher resume. But perhaps the most important aspect of a teacher portfolio is that it is something that is done by teachers, not something that is done to teachers (adapted from comments about student portfolios by Paulson, Paulson, & Meyer, 1991, p. 61). Thus teacher portfolios can be empowering for a group of professionals who often feel that they are helpless and get little respect in their jobs (Brown, 1992).

How can examples be selected for a teacher portfolio? When these ideas were first introduced to the teachers in the HELP program, one of them pointed out that she already had plenty to do and the portfolio was just one more thing for her to fit into her busy schedule. Several other teachers agreed. After some discussion, however, it became clear that she was not so much reacting to the added task of creating a portfolio as to a feeling of being overwhelmed by the length of the list of items that we had suggested for possible inclusion. She feared that she would have to include all of them, or she would be at a disadvantage relative to any other teachers who did include them all. The teachers themselves suggested strategies that could be adopted to avoid such competitive tension.

One teacher suggested that they meet and decide as a group which items they would all include. Some of the teachers did not like this idea because it could keep them from including things that they felt really represented them. We agreed that such a strategy really would defeat one of the major purposes of using portfolios in that it would limit the personalization of the portfolio and the ownership which the individual teacher would feel.

Other teachers suggested that the choices not be limited, but rather that the number of items or number of pages be limited so that all of the teachers could include what they wanted, knowing that competition, if it occurred, would be about quality not quantity.

What general strategies will help in developing a teacher portfolio? In developing any teacher portfolio, two guiding principles seem important. First, teachers should avoid deluging the reader with too much information. Instead, teachers should present representative examples of their work with clear, concise, yet reflective explanations of what those examples mean to them professionally. This is a crucial point to remember about teacher portfolios: if the portfolio contains "everything I have ever done," it will be very weak and will generally be evaluated negatively. In other words, more may prove to be less because judicious selection and commentary are critical to creating an effective teacher portfolio.

Second, teachers should avoid presenting a hodge podge of information that is impossible to interpret. Instead, they should organize their examples and reflections to make them clear and easy to read, while at the same time making sure that each item is a valid and representative sample of their abilities and accomplishments. One of the teachers at UHM suggested that a teacher portfolio should be like a "greatest hits collection of music with liner notes that explain why these particular songs were selected." That's not a bad analogy especially in terms of brevity and organization.

Another teacher at UHM described the experience of putting together a portfolio in the ELI as follows: "I liked being able to reflect upon my teaching. I liked being serious about what I was doing in the classroom. I was taking a [language teaching] theory class and working on the class I was teaching at the same time. The atmosphere in the ELI at that time made a big difference, meeting once a week, talking about what we were doing all the time. Writing it up in the portfolio was a reflection and a retrospective of what I had done. It has been really helpful ever since, because I have been able to show it to other people, and look back at what I did. It was a great experience."

We hope that you too will consider using teacher portfolios as a part of your program's teacher evaluation process, as part of your own professional development, or as part of your promotion or job application strategies. Teacher portfolios can help teachers project a professional image that simply does not come through from more traditional sources of information. More importantly, teacher portfolios can help teachers see themselves in a new light: as ever-changing and evolving language teaching professionals.

References

  • Anson, C. M. (1994). Portfolios for teachers: Writing our way to reflective practice. In K. Black, D. A. Daiker, J. Sommers, & G Stygall (Eds.), New directions in portfolio assessment: Reflective practice, critical theory, and large-scale scoring. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann.
  • Brown, J. D. (1992). The biggest problems facing ESL/EFL teachers today. TESOL Matters, 2(2), 1, 5.
  • Long, C. S. (1994). Performance assessments for beginning teachers: Options and lessons. Phi Delta Kappan, 76(4), 318-322.
  • Paulson, F. L., Paulson, P. R., & Meyer, C. A. (1991, February). What makes a portfolio a portfolio? Educational Leadership, 48, 60-63.
  • Smith, S. (Unpublished ms.). Curriculum development time: Term 19 final report. January-March 1994. Honolulu, HI: New Intensive Course of English.
  • Wolf, D. P. (1989, April). Portfolio assessment: Sampling student work. Educational Leadership, 46, 35-39.
  • Zubizarreta, J. (1994). Teaching portfolios and the beginning teacher. Phi Delta Kappan, 76(4), 323-326.

James Dean Brown, Professor in the Department of ESL at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa, has published articles on language testing and curriculum development, and three books on: reading statistical studies, language curriculum development, and language testing.

Kate Wolfe-Quintero is an Assistant Professor and Director of the English Language Institute in the Department of ESL at the University of Hawai`i. She works on developmental and pedagogical issues in second language writing.