Faculty Directions, Spring 2004 - Electronic Portfolios in Teacher Education
Debi Switzer
Department of Teacher Education
A portfolio is a purposeful collection of student work that tells the story of the student's efforts, progress, or achievement. Digitizing a portfolio makes the collection of materials less cumbersome. Eportfolios also expand available artifacts to include video clips, voice clips, music and pictures and encourage the student to make connections within the portfolio with hyperlinks. Eportfolios can be posted on the Internet and are easily duplicated, shared, and transported.
This fall the Department of Teacher Education took the first step in the implementation of program-wide eportfolios. All students in ED 105, the freshman education field experience, are required to begin their eportfolio. This group includes the teacher cadets who are working toward AP credit for ED 105 at Clemson's four partner high schools. An Excel-based template was made available at the beginning of the semester. The template has columns for descriptions of artifacts (student products), file names, reflections, course numbers, and mappings of each artifact to the six elements of the Eugene T. Moore School of Education Conceptual Framework. The template contains reminders in the form of descriptions and directions for each column within inserted comments.
Each student's eportfolio will be saved in a folder along with all artifacts listed. The Artifact File Name column will contain hyperlinks to the actual files. This way the instructor will be able to open an individual artifact without having to look for it in the folder. This semester students are keeping their folder on their Clemson U drive.
A portfolio, when used as evidence of learning and growth, has certain characteristics that set it apart from a traditional "file folder" of student products. A portfolio should include student participation in the selection of content, the guidelines for selection, the criteria for judging merit, and evidence of student reflection.
Our portfolios incorporate student participation. Even though the items they must include from ED 105 are given, students have a choice as to which specific general education artifact and which tutoring artifact they will include. Further, they have the option of including any other products that they feel are strong evidence of their learning. They can include first and last drafts, evidence of effort, or their very best work. It is their choice.
The guidelines for selection are the six elements of the Conceptual Framework and individual course requirements. Every artifact should address at least one element of the Conceptual Framework. The school will set a limit to the number of products that can be included in the portfolio so that students are forced to make choices and not include "everything but the kitchen sink." The process of limited selection encourages reflection on the learning that occurred and how best to evidence that learning.
The criteria for judging the quality of the portfolio will be developed this year and agreed upon by teacher education faculty as a whole, leading to consistent expectations across education courses. We expect the scoring guide to reflect the developmental quality of a portfolio, so scores would not be "bad" and "good," but on the order of "developing," "competent," and "advanced."
Student reflection is a critical part of a portfolio. For the portfolio to have meaning, there must be thoughtful introspection about how the learning represented by the artifact enhances the student's professional development. A reflection should communicate what the student has learned, how the artifact evidences that learning, and what further learning needs to occur. The ED 105 portfolio requires that each artifact be accompanied by a reflection. Some artifacts are inherently a reflection (for example, "My teaching philosophy"). Students can choose to store reflections for other artifacts in either a word processing document or in a cell comment. In the first case, the reflection is written in the form of a journal entry and stored in a separate file, with a hyperlink in the Reflections column (for example, "gen ed artifact R.doc"). For the second case, the student reflects within a comment inserted in the Reflection column, highlighting its presence by typing SEE COMMENT.
The Eugene T. Moore School of Education has adopted a conceptual framework that describes the type of educators that graduate from our programs: Caring, Capable, and Connected Professionals. Each of these characteristics has been divided into two elements. Our teacher candidates have caring beliefs and actions, they are capable in their knowledge and practice, and connected in their ability to communicate with others and integrate their subject matter to real life problems and solutions.
Each artifact in the portfolio must address at least one of these elements. The student must note which elements are evidenced in the artifact and include a justification of their choices in the artifact reflection.
To remind the students of the meaning of the conceptual framework elements, a comment containing a description of each element has been stored in the portfolio template at the top of each column.
An expectation is that the students will continue to add artifacts to this portfolio throughout their program. We recognize that this is an organizational portfolio. Although it contains all the elements of a portfolio, it is not in a format conducive to presentation. In the senior year each student will choose from the contents of this portfolio (including the reflections) to create a showcase portfolio to present at the end of their student teaching semester. This showcase portfolio may be in one of several formats: Microsoft® Word, PowerPoint®, Web pages, video, or any other format that allows students to communicate the breadth and depth of their competencies and experiences. Several of our education programs have already started requiring these capstone portfolio presentations with exciting results. We look forward to a time in the near future when the showcase portfolio will come from all four years of collected artifacts and personal reflections.