Research in Science Education, 1994, 24, 60-67

TEACHING PORTFOLIOS: DEVELOPING QUALITY LEARNING IN PRE-SERVlCE SCIENCE TEACHERS

Deborah Corrigan & John Loughran Monash University

ABSTRACT

The premise that underlies the pre-service science teacher education program at Monash University is the need to focus on the nature of learning in ways that encourage student-teachers to reconsider their conceptions of learning and how this relates to their view of teaching. The purpose of teaching portfolios is to act as a prompt for student-teachers to reconsider these conceptions and as a way of helping them to better articulate their professional knowledge. The Science (Stream 3) student teachers construct a portfolio of teaching strategies, episodes, ideas, etc. that demonstrate how they see their role as science teachers. The portfolio is ungraded, open- ended and organised as a dynamic assessment task, not just a static end product. This paper reports on student-teachers' understanding of, and approach to portfolios as they come to understand its purpose and value.

INTRODUCTION

All students undertaking secondary school science methods (Biology, Chemistry, General Science and Physics) in the pre-service education program at Monash University participate in an integrated program known as Stream 3. Stream 3 is designed to encourage students to reflect on their perceptions of themselves, their science knowledge and their notions of teaching and learning in science (Gunstone, Slattery, Baird & Northfield, 1993). Numerous activities are undertaken to encourage this. They include visiting primary and secondary schools, teaching on a 1:1 basis, teaching in small groups and working with Year 7 students in an outdoor setting through participation in a science camp. They are also placed in situations where their understanding of content is challenged so that they can reconsider their own science learning. The program also endeavours to model teaching strategies in context for students with the expectation that this will help participants better recognize the value of different approaches to teaching if they experience them as genuine learners, rather than simply being told about them. Students meet weekly in tutorial groups and throughout the year move through a semi-structured program designed to expand their understanding of teaching and learning science. The development of teachers as reflective practitioners is therefore a primary tenet of the Stream 3 course, and all aspects of the course, including assessment, are designed to embody this philosophy. In an attempt to further enhance student-teachers' thinking about and practice of reflection, teaching portfolios were introduced. The use of teaching portfolios was seen as one way of helping student-teachers to better articulate their view of what it means to be a science teacher. We use teaching portfolios as an assessment procedure but they are an ungraded task and as such perform a summative role as they are specifically designed to encouraged divergent learning and therefore a range of products. This paper outlines some of the research into the implementation of teaching portfolios in the Stream 3 program and its perceived value to student-teachers.

What are teaching portfolios? As Bird (1990) points out, teaching portfolios differ from the traditional notion of portfolios from areas such as architecture and photography because they are not just a collection of examples of one's work. The teaching portfolio is based on the

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subsequent learning from experiences, thoughts and actions about teaching and learning that are then the precursors to the formation of the items contained in the portfolio. The structure of portfolios is not fixed as they consist of a variety of items such as diagrams, concept maps, overviews of unit plans, photographs, teaching situations etc. so that in an interview the creator's philosophy of teaching and learning may be better understood and conveyed to the interviewer (e.g. a prospective employer).

Our work into the use of portfolios supports other research findings which suggest that as an assessment tool, portfolios demonstrate an ability to capture and convey the complex nature of teaching and learning (Barton & Collins, 1993; Shulman, 1987, 1988; Wiggins, 1989; Wolf, 1989, 1991). As Shulman (1988) points out, this is because "In general, performance assessment exercises can reflect the complexities of teaching more faithfully than do test items" (p. 38). Well-constructed portfolios can help to bridge the gap between assessments that introduce realism of performance as well as reflecting the teacher's working environment. We believe that this is largely due to the fact that portfolios give a student an opportunity to take responsibility for his/her learning. Although a teacher may set broad parameters for the portfolio, it is the student who decides what to include and, more importantly, what the contents mean. Making these decisions requires introspection and encourages students to focus more clearly and directly on their learning (Garman & Piantanida, 1991, p. 2).

Creating opportunities for student-teachers to take responsibility for their own learning and to reflect on their experiences is then fundamental to the successful implementation, and use of, teaching portfolios if they are to be valued as more than just another task in the Diploma in Education program.

In the Stream 3 program at Monash University we describe teaching portfolios as visual representations of one's philosophy of what it means to be a science teacher. One intended audience for the portfolio is a prospective employer. In this sense portfolios are an "end- product", a thing to be created. However, it is the creation process that encourages quality learning to take place and is the foundation to the final products. This creation process is drawn from the learning that the participants experience when their understanding of science content is challenged. This leads them to reconsider their understanding of the concepts involved in that content area. It is intended that this approach to learning about learning will influence their teaching practice so that the link between teaching and learning becomes more explicit. In so doing, reflection on this process influences what they consider is appropriate as a way of visually representing their learning to others through their portfolio items.

Therefore, the teaching portfolio is intended to contain items which may be used by student- teachers in an interview. Well-constructed items should then act as a prompt for individuals to articulate their understanding of teaching and learning and give the interviewer an insight into the interviewees' thoughts and actions about the complex nature of teaching practice. Our research over the past two years demonstrates that developing this understanding with student-teachers requires considerable time and is unashamedly linked to the quality of learning the individuals experience.

RESEARCH METHOD

.In 1993, all Stream 3 students (n=30) were required to produce a teaching portfolio as a course requirement. This was the first time this task had been used as a means of assessment for all Stream 3 students. As an assessment task, the portfolio is an ungraded, open-ended, divergent task designed to encourage students to creatively develop ways of displaying their understanding of teaching and learning science to others.

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The research reported in this paper is based on these students' understanding of portfolios. Data were collected from interviews from a small group of students (n=8) who volunteered to be interviewed throughout the year. These volunteers were representative of the larger Stream 3 group as they came from the range of science subjects offered and reflected the gender composition of the group as a whole.

Interviews were conducted twice, first mid-way through the course and again just prior to the end of the year. Interviews were conducted by independent researchers who worked through a semi-structured interview protocol (Box 1) designed to determine the students' understanding of the Stream 3 course, its assessment procedures, and their view of the portfolio task. The use of research assistants was also one way of diminishing the likelihood that participants would feel obliged to tell us what they thought we (as their teachers) might want to hear.

BOX 1: THE INTERVIEW PROTOCOL

1. How do you feel the Stream 3 program is going? What do you think of it?. 2. How would you describe the Stream 3 approach to teaching and learning? 3. Can you think of any examples of teaching and learning that you think are interesting from the Stream 3 program? 4. What were expectations of Dip.Ed. before your joined the course? How do you think they have changed? Why?. 5. What do you think the course should do for you? How should it change? 6. What have you found most beneficial in the course? 7. What ways have you learnt through the Stream 3 program? 8. What is the Stream 3 approach to assessment?. How do you feel about that?. 9. What are the Stream 3 tutorials like? How do they affect your view of learning to teach science? 10. What would you see as the strengths and weaknesses of Stream 3? 11. How have you found the portfolio task?. 12. How are portfolios approached in tutorials? 13. What sort of products are you producing? 14. What is the purpose of portfolios? How would you describe the portfolio to someone else? 15. What value do you place on the portfolio? 16. What do you think is the point of portfolios? 17. How do portfolios fit in with Stream 3, assessment, teaching and learning?

Data were also collected via an open-ended questionnaire completed at the end of the course by 22 of the 30 Stream 3 students. The questionnaire (Box 2) was administered at the end of the course after participants had received their final assessments. It was anticipated that this would also help to disassociate portfolio evaluation and student assessment so that a broader understanding of participants' views of portfolios, and the value they placed on the experience, could be obtained.

FINDINGS

The focus of the portfolio was for the students to consciously develop and articulate their philosophy of what it means to be a science teacher. Students had to link many different ideas, some they had brought with them to the course, others they had developed throughout their pre-service year. It required them to make judgments about these ideas, and the value

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BOX 2: PORTFOLIO QUESTIONNAIRE

SECTION 1: The Process of the Teaching Portfolio 1. When did you start working on your portfolio and what prompted it? 2. What were your expectations of the teaching portfolio? 3. How would you describe your approach to the teaching portfolio? (Did you take the task seriously?.) 4. How would you describe the value of the process?

(a) Was the teaching portfolio a valuable process? (b) Is it worth doing? Why?.

5. (a) What did you see as the role of the Stream 3 tutorials? (b) Is this appropriate? What suggestions would you have to improve the process?

SECTION 2: The Teaching Portfolio - the Product 1. What did you include in your teaching portfolio? 2. Why did you include the things mentioned above? 3. How did you go about organising your teaching portfolio? 4. What role do you see the portfolio having? 5. Have you used the portfolio in any way?. Explain. 6. Do you see the portfolio having a role in the future? Explain. (Why/Why not?.)

they placed on them so that as they reflected on their learning some ideas were either modified or discarded. In this case, reconsidering their own science content knowledge was the context for reconceptualising the process of learning.

IntervLew findin.qs

As an open-ended assessment task, the creation of a teaching portfolio encouraged diverse options for students which enabled them to produce a portfolio that specified their individual view of teaching and learning in science. However, being so open-ended presented problems for the students as they struggled to understand how to complete the task. The majority initially thought the portfolio should be a collection of resources that could be gathered throughout the year so that on completion of the course they could simply "bundle them together". These views shifted over time as students began to understand how reflecting on their learning could influence their thinking of the portfolio process. As one student noted, "It's helped me organise my learnir~gs from Stream 3 and methods (teaching disciplines) under one umbrella."

It Was not until the students linked the notion of presenting their views on their learning to another person (e.g. a prospective employer) that a better understanding of the task began to emerge. Being placed in situations where they began to articulate their view of learning helped them to better explain their understanding of their approach to teaching.

Throughout the interviews it was increasingly apparent that there was a gap between the students' thinking and doing in terms of portfolio production. If an individual had not -attempted to produce a portfolio item then there was a sense of confusion about what to produce. The portfolio process was seen as separate from the portfolio product because the explicit link in thinking about the learning and teaching had not been made. Until a situation arose where it was necessary to reflect on one's experience (by producing an item) the notion of a portfolio was an abstract concept. Once work on a product was initiated a better

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understanding of the portfolio developed. The following quotes are indicative participants' views of this:

Ellie: It is so I look at things done in science...and pick out various incidents and put them in the portfolio under some sort of title and say what I have learnt from it, indicate what I have done and what I have achieved, what I learnt from it and what it meant to me, and how it will impact on my teaching in the future.

Bruce: If you have a reason for doing something you can actually point it at that reason. If you have no reason to do it, it just becomes an onerous piece of work with no meaning ... now that I understand the task, there is a point and it is worthwhile.

Portfolio development is a dynamic task as the episodes, opportunities for learning that the students' experience throughout the pre-service year "colour" and give definition to their philosophy of what it means to be a science teacher. For example, tutorial sessions were important so that students could link the notion of the 'process and the product' of portfolios.

For the students to explore their thinking and learning, they needed opportunities to formulate their views and to try them out with others. To foster this, the processes of the tutorial sessions were seen as a way of helping them to modify, adapt and adjust their ideas through sharing them with others.

Irene: ...they [tutorial sessions] make you think. If teachers just tell you something, it doesn't make you think...strategies used in Stream 3 are meant to help me as a learner as well as a teacher. The point of the tutes [tutorial sessions] is to share experiences and learn from them.

It is likely then that a good understanding of the portfolio task would not evolve if the participants were not given opportunities to reflect on what they had done and learnt from their experiences. We viewed tutorial sessions as essential for this to occur as we were able to help individuals grapple with their learning about teaching and learning and to reflect on these experiences. Through this they could process the ideas that they had and to conceptualise their developing understanding of their approach to teaching and learning science.

Questionnaire findings

Students' perceptions of the portfolio task (Box 2, Q.3) shows that only 20% of the respondents saw the task as useful and took the task seriously from the outset, e.g. "My aim with the portfolio was to produce something of a standard suitable to be used in a job interview - I took it very seriously." The low percentage offering such responses is explained by the fact that 50% were initially confused by the task. They struggled in their approach to the task as they did not fully understand what was intended. When this problem was overcome, they then approached it with more enthusiasm and took it more seriously.This understanding of the task is an important point as shown by Q.4 (Box 2). Responses to this question demonstrated that the portfolio task was seen as a valuable process by most students, but only when they fully understood the task. Only two students did not see the process as valuable. The majority commented on the usefulness of the portfolio task for encouraging "reflection on the course', presenting "views on teaching", reviewing "things learnt during the year", and formulating "goals for the future".

Most students viewed tutorial sessions as a means of broadening their ideas about, and strategies for teaching and learning science (Box 2, Q.5). These were also seen as good for

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discussing ideas encountered throughout the Stream 3 course. In this sense, the portfolio is a partly shared/communal activity, suggesting their learning extends to all members of the group and not just the presenter. The size of tutorial groups was seen as important by two respondents as a diminished size in tutorial groups (n<8) led to less opportunity to interact and learn from each other. This highlights the importance of interaction in learning as the tutorial sessions were designed as genuine learning experiences for participants whereby their initial conceptions of science content knowledge was challenged. Hence, de-briefing after a session was important from both a teaching perspective (especially so for the presenter) and from a learning perspective (the participants). Using these sessions to then reflect on the experiences was part of the process of portfolio development.

Our intention was that through this process, an individual's final portfolio items would be constructed by reflecting on these experiences. Therefore, we thought a good portfolio item would act as a prompt to the learning through these processes and be a stimulating visual representation that would encourage an interviewer to want to know more about the student- teacher's thinking. Although this was difficult for student-teachers to understand before they had experienced both the process and the product aspects of the portfolio, it was interesting to note participants' responses of the product. The questionnaire probed perceptions of what the final portfolio represented and included:

The portfolio is made up of things rye done, things I've seen and things rd like to try. It's a good way of showing [a prospective employer] what you know/understand. It's an insight into me as a person and as a teacher. It shows that I am still developing skills and gaining knowledge that will benefit my career. Because my view of teaching is that people learn in many different ways, content must be presented and investigated in many different ways, my portfolio tries to show that.

Students saw portfolios as having two important roles, one was as a tool to take to an interview to promote themselves and have some control over the direction of the interview, another was that of showing what they had learnt about learning and teaching in science.

!.ndependent Learninq

Portfolio use in the Stream 3 program was also designed to reinforce the idea of students developing responsibility for their own learning, becoming independent learners with respect to their own teaching and learning. It is therefore interesting to consider the range of views about what it means to be an independent learner which were suggested during the interviews.

Irene:

Stan:

Ellie:

...you do not expect the teacher to do everything for you, to think for you, tell you what to learn, tell you what to pay attention to...I think it is students [who] start to think about wanting to know more, want to know other things. Presenting the learner with something and getting them interested in it so it's not you [the teacher] making them learn, it's them wanting to learn. Once they start wanting to learn they start asking questions and the drive for learning is coming from them and not from you. A critical approach to the information which is offered to you.

Strangely, students found it difficult to articulate how a knowledge of what it meant to be an independent learner would influence their own practice even after stating that the teaching

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strategies adopted in Stream 3 were designed to foster independent learning. A good example of this was the way that many interviewees thought that independent learners question what they are doing and make links between different experiences and pieces of information, yet this is exactly what students initially found difficult to do with their portfolios. Until they started to construct an end-product, the (apparently) abstract nature of the product task made it difficult for them to apply such strategies to their own learning experiences. They were not consciously linking their learning from one context to another.

This encapsulates what we see as the paradox of portfolio production. It is difficult for an individual to imagine what to produce until they review their own learning and experiment with ways of articulating this to others. The process of producing a portfolio fosters independent learning but students do not recognize this until they start to construct an end-product. It takes some time for students to recognize the difference between producing a portfolio item that reflects one's achievements and an item that is an insight into one's thinking.

CURRENT AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

The use of portfolios in Stream 3 is still developing. Two main areas being investigated further (at time of writing) are the impact of teaching portfolios on prospective employers and how to resolve the paradox of portfolio production. Research into the first area is currently under way where we are attempting to gain insight into how useful portfolios are in interview situations and how they are perceived by employers. We have organised interviews for all of our 1994 Stream 3 students with practising science teachers in order to help the student- teachers explore ways of using them in an interview so that we can learn more about how interviewers respond to the portfolios.

Addressing the paradox of portfolio production is also under way. The 1994 Stream 3 students were introduced to the idea of teaching portfolios by explaining that the portfolio should be seen as a visual representation of their view of what it means to be a science teacher. It was introduced with the emphasis on it as a product that they could take to an interview for a teaching position. Examples of some portfolio items that previous students had prepared were also presented at this stage. To introduce the importance of the process involved in portfolio production, students were given the experience of having an area of their science content knowledge challenged. They were put into a learning experience where their understanding of a concept (force) was tested by making predictions, observations and explanations about the concept in different contexts. At the conclusion of this teaching sequence students were asked to represent what they had learnt from the experience in a one-page format as a homework task. There were no restrictions on how to represent what they had learnt other than the one-page limit. We (their teachers) also produced a one-page item demonstrating our learning. In the next session, we were all required to work in pairs and with that partner, to attempt to articulate our understanding of our learning by using the portfolio item as a prompt to that thinking.

This process generated a session that contained a "buzz" of excitement and motivation among students as we explored our understanding. It was one of those sessions that was truly educative. Students then went home and modified their representations according to the feedback they had obtained from their peers. The value of the process involved in portfolio production became immediately apparent to those involved (staff and students) and we think that this is one valuable way of addressing the paradox of the portfolio. We now look forward to continuing this work so that the links between quality learning and quality teaching become much more explicit for the students as they come to better understand the use and value of portfolios.

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CONCLUSION

The use of teaching portfolios in the Stream 3 program at Monash University is a deliberate attempt to foster independent learning about the teaching process. The learning is intended to result in developing knowledge that is meaningful and useful to the participants. To do this portfolios are prepared in a very supportive environment that allows students time for reflection, experimentation and risk-taking in their teaching and learning. It is hoped through this approach to portfolio development students will have a greater understanding of the process of learning. If so, then they will also have had the opportunity to make more explicit the links between this and their understanding of teaching. The articulation of their ideas on these issues through their teaching portfolio gives them a good basis for further professional development which we hope will continue throughout their teaching careers.

REFERENCES

Barton, J., & Collins, A. (1993). Portfolios in teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 44(3), 200-212.

Bird, T. (1990). The schoolteacher's portfolio: An essay on possibilities. In J. Millman, & L Darling-Hammond, (eds.) The new handbook of teacher evaluation: assessinq elementary and secondary school teachers. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Garman, N.B. & Piantanida, M. (1991). The academic/professional portfolio. The Australian Administrator, 12(3), 1-5.

Gunstone, R.F., Slattery, M., Baird, J.R., & Northfield, J.R. (1993). A case study exploration of development in pre-service science teachers. Science Education, 77(1), 47-73.

Shulman, L.S. (1987). Assessment for teaching: An initiative for the profession. Phi Delta Kappan, 69(1), 38-44.

Shulman, L.S. (1988). A union of insufficiencies: Strategies for teacher assessment in a period of reform. Educational Leadership, 48(3), 36-41.

Wiggins, G. (1989). Teaching to the (authentic) test. Educational Leadership, 46(7), 41-49. Wolf, D.P. (1989). Portfolio assessment: Sampling student work. Educational Leadership,

46(7), 35-39. Wolf, K. (1991). The schoolteacher's portfolio: Issues in design, implementation, and

evaluation. Phi Delta Kappan, 73, 129-136.

AUTHORS

DEBORAH CORRIGAN, Lecturer, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Clayton, Vic. 3168 .Specializations: chemistry and science education, technology and industry links with science curriculum.

DR: JOHN LOUGHRAN, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Clayton, Vic. 3168. Specializations: science education, reflection, curriculum and evaluation.