Chapter 5: Web-Based Digital Teaching Portfolios: What Happens After They Graduate?

Many teacher educators in schools, colleges, and departments of education (SCDEs) have been expanding their views about how they might measure teacher competence and knowledge. Traditionally, measures only involved the use of standardized approaches (i.e., NTE, PRAXIS exams). However, today, more and more SCDEs are also using authentic measures such as teaching portfolios (Wray, 2001) to provide more information about a teacher’s ability to teach. A teaching portfolio, according to Shulman (1998), 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” (p. 37). McKinney (1998) suggests that “[teacher] educators have found that well-constructed portfolios may help to capture the complexities of learning, teaching, and learning to teach when used as authentic assessment tools within courses and programs in Colleges of Education” (p. 85). Moreover, three professional associations representing the “threelegged stool of teacher quality” (National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 1996, p. 29), the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) advocate the use of teaching portfolios as performance-based measures.