Chapter 3: A Five-Step Model for Enhancing Electronic Teaching Portfolios

Dissatisfied with traditional measures of student learning, many teacher educators are implementing performance-based assessment, including portfolios, to measure teaching effectiveness. In contrast to standardized tests, performance assessment is based on a collaborative, active learning model, with the goal of assuring success on “real world” tasks (Spady & Marshall, 1991). Students are informed of performance standards, most often through rubrics, and they have opportunities to improve through self-reflection and faculty mentoring (Wigle & White, 1998).

As defined by Shulman, a teaching portfolio is: “the structured, documentary history of a set of coached or mentored acts of teaching, substantiated by samples of student portfolios, and fully realized only through reflective writing, deliberation, and conversation” (1998, p. 37). Through groundbreaking work at Stanford University’s Teacher Assessment project, beginning in the 1980s, Shulman and his colleagues recommended portfolios as a way to provide a broader, more contextualized view of teaching than is possible with standardized tests.