The Teacher Portfolio in the Context of Professional Motivation

The material discusses an important problem for our education - increasing its quality and efficiency. In this aspect the role of the professional portfolio is interpreted as an external motivator to stimulate the professional development / self-development of pedagogical specialists, to increase the level of their competence. In the context of the reflective approach the great importance is placed on the professional reflection as activity of the pedagogical specialists: for work with the others; for working with knowledge, technology and information and for working with society. The main mechanism for this is the reflexive in nature materials and procedures.

Action Research and Teacher Portfolio as Two Strong Teacher-Led Professional Development Designs

This chapter aims to describe two effective teacher-led professional development designs: action research and teacher portfolio. Research has shown that many professional development models and practices are ineffective while meeting teachers' professional needs and highlight the critical role of teachers during their professional development activities. Action research and teacher portfolio offers teachers the opportunity to conduct needs assessment, revisit and reflect on their practices, and evaluate their performances. This reflective, authentic, and evidence-based assessment procedure enables teachers search for resources that perfectly meets their professional needs. This chapter examines features of action research and teacher portfolio implementations as two meaningful teacher-led professional development models and offer rich descriptions of these models to inform practitioners and stakeholders.

Helping parents reexamine children’s emergent writing performance through parent–teacher portfolio sharing conferences

This study documented how the teacher conducted one-on-one portfolio sharing conferences with the parents to help them understand their children’s emergent writing performances. Data included the selection and analysis of children’s writing samples, parent–teacher conferences, and teacher interviews. The results indicated that parents’ perspectives on children’s writing reflect their concerns regarding their children’s transition to elementary education and limited understanding of emergent writing development. After the parent–teacher conferences, the parents demonstrated better understanding of emergent writing, became more confident about their children’s writing performance, and affirmed the benefits of parent–teacher sharing conferences. Lastly, the study increased teachers’ understanding about parents’ perspectives and improved the teacher–parent relationship.

Portfolio jako narzędzie kształcenia refleksyjności przyszłych nauczycieli języków obcych

Being a reflective teacher is a highly appreciated quality of a good teacher. Reflection is considered to be essential in the job of teaching since it prompts to modify and improve the process of teaching and learning. As experts suggest reflective skills can be practiced and developed due to various teacher education models, programs and techniques. One of the techniques is a teacher portfolio that can consist of many tasks provoking teachers and teacher-trainees to reflect on their teaching. This article presents some research on the content of English teacher-trainees’ reflection and their metareflection. The research outcome provides some knowledge of what they reflect upon, if they do at all, and whether they perceive reflectionas valuable in the process of learning teaching.

“Pretty Good Practices” for the Design of Teacher Portfolio Courses

In this chapter, the authors argue that although portfolios are a popular means of teacher evaluation, they, like any other assessment, must be properly implemented if they are to realize their full potential. Accordingly, they offer seven “pretty good practices” (Mishra, 2008) for designing portfolio courses: peer feedback, authentic audience, diverse resources, learning by doing, open access, confidential spaces, and self-pacing. These practices were developed from the authors' extensive work helping teachers to develop portfolios that demonstrate their learning in their graduate studies, and they help students create portfolios that have value as both summative assessments and places for formative growth. In the spirit of “pretty good practices,” however, the authors invite others to modify these practices for other contexts or to carry out research that would help refine and improve them.

A contemporary approach to performance evaluation: Teacher portfoliosPerformans değerlendirmesinde çağdaş bir yaklaşım: Öğretmen dosya değerlendirmesi

The aim of this study is discussing teacher portfolio’s areas of usage, purposes, benefits and limits as audit approach. This study is a review article and it helps analyzing the evaluation of teacher portfolio. In this direction, the areas of usage of teacher portfolio has been examined and its benefits and limits has been tried to determined as a result of literature review. Portfolio is considered to be an approach used for the evaluation of only students. However, in many world countries, teacher portfolio is benefited from for the evaluation of teacher candidates in higher education. As a matter of fact, teacher file evaluation has a wide range of usage pre-service and in service. On the other hand, it is observed that this application is not common in terms of higher education in Turkey and enough amount of research has not been conducted on the application. Although this kind of attempts on the evalution of teacher candidates exist by Ministry of National Education, but effectiveness of it has not been evaluated. Therefore, it is crucial to determine in which situations teacher portfolio should be used, what evaluation criterion, benefits and limits are. It has been suggested that researchs should be conducted in order to be determined the efficiency in use of the approach applied by MoNE, and to be made improvements in this direction.Extended English abstract is in the end of Full Text PDF (TURKISH) file. ÖzetBu çalışmanın amacı, öğretmen dosya değerlendirmesinin (portfolyo) bir denetim yaklaşımı olarak kullanım alanlarını, amacını, faydaları ve sınırlılıklarını tartışmaktır. Makale bir derleme çalışması olup öğretmen dosya değerlendirmesinin analiz edilmesine yardımcı olmaktadır. Bu doğrultuda öğretmen dosya değerlendirmesinin kullanım alanları incelenmiş, faydaları ve sınırlılıkları alanyazın taraması neticesinde tespit edilmeye çalışılmıştır. Dosya değerlendirmesi, yalnızca öğrencilerin değerlendirilmesinde kullanılan bir yaklaşım olarak düşünülmektedir. Ancak dünyanın birçok ülkesinde, yükseköğretimde öğretmen adaylarının değerlendirilmesinde dosya değerlendirmesinden yararlanılmaktadır. Nitekim öğretmen dosya değerlendirmesinin hizmet öncesi ve içinde çok yaygın bir kullanım alanı bulunmaktadır. Buna karşın Türkiye’de yükseköğretim açısından bu uygulamanın yaygın olmadığı ve uygulama ile ilgili yeterli araştırmanın yapılmadığı görülmektedir. Aday öğretmenlerin değerlendirilmesinde ise Milli Eğitim Bakanlığının bu tür bir çalışmasının olduğu görülse de henüz etkililiği değerlendirilmemiştir. Bu nedenle öğretmen dosya değerlendirmesinin hangi durumlarda kullanılacağının, değerlendirme ölçütlerinin neler olduğunun, fayda ve sınırlılıklarının belirlenmesi önemli görülmektedir. Bakanlık tarafından uygulanan bu yaklaşımının uygulamadaki etkililiğinin tespit edilmesi için araştırmaların yürütülmesi ve bu doğrultuda uygulamanın geliştirilmesi önerilmektedir.

Effects of Teacher Portfolio Construction on English Language Teachers' Perceived Teaching Competencies

This study investigates the effects of teacher portfolio construction upon in-service English language teachers' perceived teaching competencies. With the participation of six non-native teachers, data were collected through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews conducted before and after a sixteen-week teacher portfolio construction program. Analyses of the data through descriptive statistics and inductive content analysis revealed that the teachers' perceptions related to their teaching competencies were quite high prior to the portfolio construction process. After the process, however, decrease was observed in the teachers' perceived competencies. Findings also showed that the portfolio construction program was effective for the teachers' in that the process led them to become more self-evaluative, thus reflective and realistic about their competencies.

Using Facebook as an e-portfolio in enhancing pre-service teachers’ professional development

<p class="Body1">This study aims to determine if <em>Facebook</em>, when used as an online teacher portfolio (OTP), could contribute meaningfully to pre-service teachers’ professional development (PD) and in what ways the OTP can be meaningful. Pre-service teachers (<em>n</em> = 91) were asked to develop OTP using <em>Facebook</em> and engage in learning and professional development (PD) activities for 14 weeks. Questionnaires, open-ended items and reflective reports were used to collect data and it was found that many of the pre-service teachers benefitted quite significantly in terms of their development as future teachers through these five facets: (i) community of practice; (ii) professional learning and identity; (iii) relevant skills; (iv) resources; and (v) confidence.</p>