The Evergreen State College

Master in Teaching Program

Student Portfolio Requirements

Revised Edition: MIT 2003-2005

Portfolios: Why Do We Use Them

and What ARE They?

Faculty members in the Master in Teaching Program choose to use portfolios as learning and assessment tools for three major reasons:

Evergreen has an established history of using journals, program portfolios, and self-evaluation as an important aspect of encouraging reflective, self-directed learning.

The State of Washington has been involved in an extensive education reform movement since 1993 that focuses on the ability of students to DEMONSTRATE what they have learned. Portfolios are one of the assessment tools that public school teachers need to be able to use effectively to help students demonstrate what they know and can do.

As a faculty team, we believe that the selection/reflection aspect of the portfolio process we use is crucial for developing reflective, active learners who understand what they know and what they need to learn.

You will be doing a lot of writing of one kind or another during the next two years. You will be writing in preparation for seminars, keeping a journal of field observations in classrooms, preparing drafts and rewrites of educational philosophy papers, compiling notes about how to use computers, the library, and media, drafting your ethnic autobiography, completing exercises for workshops, and writing self-reflections of various kinds. Additionally, as you begin to do research for your Master's Paper, you will be collecting bibliographic references, ideas, Xerox copies of articles, annotations, etc. All of these things should be saved in Portfolio Files for reference and easy access when you are ready to create your formal portfolios.

Formal Program Portfolios-- Each program member will create four formal portfolios that will reflect her/his progress at various points in the program. The portfolios will be used in two ways:

They will provide you with a means of reflecting about what you already know, and what you learn during the program -- about yourself as a teacher/learner; about children and adolescents; about teaching, and about what you know in the subject areas you want to teach. They also will give you an opportunity to reflect on what you still need to work on.

They will also provide faculty with demonstrations of what you have accomplished and what you know relative to teaching and learning so that your work may be evaluated and decisions made about Advancement to Candidacy, preparation for student teaching, certification, and the award of the Master in Teaching degree.

The portfolios you will develop in the program are as follows:

1. Advancement to Candidacy Portfolio - This is the first formal portfolio that you will assemble. It is due at the end of the first quarter and will be the basis for your evaluation conference. The material in the portfolio will be evaluated as a part of your demonstration of readiness for Advancement to Candidacy. Advancement to Candidacy signifies that you have demonstrated the competencies and knowledge necessary to successfully complete graduate level work. In addition, an assessment of your ability to help children and adolescents achieve the learning goals specified in the State of Washington Essential Academic Learning Requirements (EALR’s) is required in this portfolio.

2. Advancement to Student Teaching Portfolio - You must submit this second formal portfolio near the end of the third quarter, Spring, 2004, prior to your student teaching in the Fall. Four important parts of this portfolio are:

demonstrations of your ability to plan effective, developmentally, and culturally appropriate learning experiences that reflect the appropriate EALR’s,

demonstrations of your understanding of cultural encapsulation and the efforts and strategies you employ to monitor your own cultural filters (an evaluation of your “cultural encapsulation” is required in this portfolio),

demonstrations of who you are as a person, including appropriate clarity of personal identity, values, moral commitments, and awareness of personal needs being filled through teaching, and,

your Master's Paper, which you will complete during the Summer Quarter and submit before you student teach in August of 2004.

3. Presentation Portfolio - As a part of your work during the first quarter of student teaching, you will be planning lessons/units keyed to the Washington State Essential Academic Learning Requirements (EALR’s). In addition, you will be keeping a reflective journal about your teaching, and you will have opportunities to assess your students' performances. These materials, as well as photographs of your classrooms, and videotapes of yourself teaching, will provide rich material for the development of a "presentation portfolio" of your own design. This portfolio will give you an opportunity to assemble your best work and to reflect on your strengths and creativity as an emerging teacher, as well as areas you need to strengthen. These portfolios are due Week 10 of Fall Quarter student teaching and will also be shared with program colleagues at the start of Winter Quarter, 2005.

4. Professional Presentation Portfolio - You will use this final portfolio, which is due during the last program quarter, Spring 2005, as a professional reflection of your work. It will include a revised resume, a revised philosophy of education statement, as well as pieces of your work selected by you, to represent your unique skills and competencies for teaching. In preparation for developing your portfolio, during Winter Quarter of Year Two, you will have opportunities to talk with teachers and principals, have a mock interview with a principal, and read current literature on the use of professional portfolios.

As the time approaches for preparing each of these portfolios, you will receive a separate outline of the skills, knowledge, attitudes and behaviors that you must document. As you gather material for your portfolio, you will see how important your Portfolio Files are. You will need to look at all of the work you produce during the program and make important decisions about which pieces of your work demonstrate the specified areas of skill, knowledge, attitudes and behaviors.

Once your selections are made, you will need to write reflective essays about your work that discuss the type of growth demonstrated by your selections, how and why you think the growth occurred, why these particular choices are good representatives of your work, and why they support either a) your application for Candidacy, b) your readiness to student teach, or c) your application for employment.