Mapping Professional Performances:
An E-Portfolio System for Teacher Education
Delwyn L. Harnisch, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Curriculum and Instruction,
214B Henzlik Hall
University of Nebraska
Lincoln, NE 68588-0355
Ronald J. Shope, Ph.D.
Professor
Communication and Research
Grace University,
1311 S. 9th St.
Omaha, NE 68108
Abstract
Teacher preparation today faces many challenges. These include staying current with classroom practices (Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman & Yoon, 2001; Goodlad, 1990), the increasing use of technology in the classroom (Rosenthal, 1999) and the “revolving door” in the workforce (Ingersoll, 2001). This means that teachers need to be constantly upgrading their skills. Teacher preparation, therefore, should be thought of as a continuum that begins with teacher preparation and continues through professional development throughout a teacher’s career (Bransford, Brown & Cocking, 2000). One way this can best be accomplished through the creation of Professional Learning Communities using electronic portfolios. An example of an electronic portfolio system is IBeam. IBeam supports collaboration, has the ability to deliver learned centered assessments, and the ability to map content and assignments to standards. This approach supports a research-based approach to both personal development and curriculum.
Introduction and Literature Review
Teacher Education programs must adequately prepare teachers to meet the new challenges of 21st century. There are three major challenges that face teacher education. First, it appears that many teacher preparation programs are not keeping up with current classroom practices (Garet, Porter, DeSimone, Birman, & Yoon, 2001; Goodlad, 1990). The result is teachers who are using outdated methods. One example is in the teaching of mathematics. According to the report from The National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century (2000), entitled Before It’s Too late, U.S. students are receiving only a superficial knowledge in today’s classrooms. The report states:
“In an age now driven by the relentless necessity of scientific and technological advance, the preparation our students receive in mathematics and science is, in a word, unacceptable. Despite our good intentions, their learning is too often superficial. Students’ grasp of science as a process of discovery, and of mathematics as the language of scientific reasoning is often formulaic, fragile, or absent altogether” (p. 10).
The report notes that the problem with current science education is that students are not required to master “big concepts that make science so powerful and fascinating” (The National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century 2000). In mathematics, the content is limited to questions that answer “What” and get little content that addresses “How” and “Why should I care.”
In addition, the continued integration of technology into P-12 classrooms presents two challenges to Teacher Education programs. Rosenthal (1999) notes, “Bringing faculty members and America’s teaching force up to speed [technologically] is a massive task. . . a problem that will be greatly exacerbated if the teachers entering the profession have not been adequately prepared to use information technologies” (p. 22). This indicates that there is a need to restructure the curriculum in teacher education programs. Levin, Buell, & Levin (1999), note, “Curriculum restructuring based on the integration of appropriate technologies is an important step toward systemic reform.” The second challenge is to assess the progress of students toward meeting ISTE Standards. To do this, assessments must be linked to standards. This linkage not only provides a means to measure a students’ progress toward achieving the standards, but the standards also becomes part of the educational “dialogue” regarding course objectives, teaching methods, and assessment (Levin, Buell & Levin, 1999).
Finally, there are changes in the teaching workforce which Ingersoll (2001) refers to as the “revolving door.” These changes include teachers who leave the profession for other jobs, retirement, and teachers moving to other schools. These changes have a negative impact on student achievement (National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 2002).
The solution to these problems is to develop systems that address not only teacher preparation but professional development that helps to improve teaching methods (Elmore, 1997) and supplies teachers with resources that ultimately have an impact on the quality of student learning (Hinds, 2002).
To address these issues, teacher preparation must be thought of as a “continuum” that begins with preserve preparation and continues throughout a teacher’s career through professional development programs (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; National Research Council, 2000; Wilson, Floden, & Ferrini-Mundy, 2001).
Developing A Professional Community of Learners
The solutions to the problems can best be addressed when teachers collaborate together. One key component to innovation is communication (DuFour & Baker, 1998). “Inattention to communication is a leading cause of the failure of change efforts” (Dufour and Baker 1998, p. 129).” McLaughlin and Talbert (1993) found that when teachers were brought together for collaboration, they developed a body of knowledge and wisdom related to learning. Professional Learning Communities provide a framework for collaboration both for preservice and in service classroom teachers. Professional Learning Communities are built on shared goals and values; facilitate communication and collaboration about teaching and learning, and a means to assess the progress that’s being made (Dufour and Baker, 1998). Professional Learning Communities enable teachers to better focus their planning and teaching, develop a common curriculum and better assessments, isolate areas of the curriculum that are not performing well and motivate teachers to continually improve (Dufour and Baker, 1998, p. 176-178).
Creating an Electronic Professional Learning Community with IBeam
One tool that can be used to Create Professional Learning Communities is electronic portfolios. There are three main types of electronic portfolios which are formative portfolios used to support professional development, summative portfolios, used as an assessment tool during formal education, and marketing portfolios, used to demonstrate their skills during employment search. While one of the primary purposes of electronic portfolios is to document the progress of a student over time, electronic portfolios can also be used as a tool to build Professional Learning Communities throughout a teacher’s career. There are three essential features that the electronic portfolio must have to facilitate a Professional Learning Community. These are the abilities to allow members collaboration, the capability to link assignments to standards, the ability, and finally they must provide the user with the aptitude to develop assessment tools to evaluate learning.
An Example of an electronic portfolio that provides these features is IBeam developed by Delwyn Harnisch at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln in conjunction with Riverwatcher of Champaign, Illinois. IBeam has features that allow teachers to communicate and collaborate, link classroom work to standards, and perform assessment to measure progress (Harnisch & Shope, 2002). All of the data and materials on this web-based application is password protected. It is also capable of being used at multiple sites. An overview of some of the functional elements of this program can be found in the Appendix. IBeam is capable of supporting a Learning Community through it’s ability to facilitate collaboration, deliver appropriate assessments, and link learning to standards.
Collaborative Relationships
IBeam supports collaboration in two ways. First, teachers can share information and broaden their knowledge and skills. The collaborative environment enhances the sharing of knowledge and the development of skills. Vygotsky (1978) recognized that there is a social nature to learning. While there are activities that children can perform on their own, there are other functions that they can perform with scaffolding that others can provide. Collaborative relationships within the community provides the scaffolding that enable teachers to improve their practice. IBeam allows teachers to share their knowledge through a portfolio system that supports the posting or hyperlinks through the web to many document and image formats. The documents posted within the portfolio can be managed by the user.
Documents can be uploaded to a designated upload site. For example, during preservice education, students can upload papers or other materials to be graded by the teacher or create a hyperlink to the location of the materials. Once an assignment has been submitted, it can’t be altered or resubmitted unless the instructor gives permission. Students can check the status of an assignment they’ve submitted when they log in. Instructors can also check to see which assignments are pending and those that need to be graded. In IBeam’s online grade book, students can check their grades on assignments and for the course.
The building and managing, and feedback loop of the electronic portfolio is essential to building the scaffolding for learning various tasks. In preservice education, for example, teacher education departments determine an overall list of what is needed in the portfolio. These items not only can be used to document progress toward achieving standards, but could also be used as scaffolding to facilitate learning. For example, items that address issues in assessment could be built to address level skills first. Teachers could then give feedback on the assignment which will help the student to improve the skill. In addition, using the discussion feature, other students could also contribute to the process which will help to build the knowledge base.
This feature could be used much the same way with practicing teachers. Teachers could generate documents that could be shared with other teachers which are used for information, if desired, evaluated by members of the Professional Learning Community. If feedback is desired, teachers could share it through email or through a threaded discussion.
Second, relationships are needed for effective problem-solving, Fullan (2001) notes that while building a knowledge base is necessary is an important part of problem solving, people must have the commitment and social dynamics must be in place before they will share knowledge (p. 6). He writes, “To put it another way, turning information into knowledge is a social (italics his) process, and for that you need good relationships” (p.6). in place for that knowledge to be shared.
IBeam supports collaborative problem solving relationships through groups and by providing forums for threaded discussions. Groups of students or reams of teachers can be created within a course or within a Professional Learning Community at a school. Groups can collaborate together on projects through shared documents or discussions. Only those within the group have access to the group’s documents. For example, only the Geometry community will have access to assessments or discussions about curriculum issues that are related to Geometry.
IBeam also facilitated collaboration the “Forum” page. The discussion is an important means of maintaining community. By using the Forum, the community that has begun in the classroom can continue throughout the week or even throughout a student’s career even if they are not on campus.
When used as part of a class, the instructor can review forums and discussion threads and post new threads. The forums can be used as prompts for students to reflect on assignments or classroom content. Students could also be encouraged to post additional threads to the discussion which enables them to take ownership of the discussion. They could also be used as a means to reflect on work. For example, the instructor could post a rubric, and the students could post comments regarding its strengths and weaknesses. The forms could also be used to share insight gained in practicum and student teaching. A student teacher might post a problem that he or she encountered in the classroom and other student teachers, or even the instructor could offer insight into how it might be solved. This would be especially valuable when students are doing their student teaching away from the institution.
Delivering Appropriate Assessments
Assessment is a form of Action Research that addresses questions related to teaching methods that not only focus on content, but on questions that center on how students learn and solve problems (Pellegrino, 2001). Roberts (2002) notes, “In every other field, research means continually pushing the envelope and continually testing the ideas with documentation, real observation, and a variety of experimental designs. That’s what we all have to keep asking for in education” (p. 7). Pellegrino (2002) summarizes assessment as “Knowing what students know.” He expands this idea in the “Assessment Triangle” which is illustrated in Figure1.
When students learn, they create a conceptual system to organize their knowledge. this not only includes cognitive information, but observation and interpretation. Assessment must include each of these parts of the system to determine how students are learning.
This means that instruction must be “learner centered.” There are several motivational and instructional factors that characterize a learner centered environment. First, instruction must me made meaningful and relevant from the individual learner’s perspective. When instruction is learner-centered it implies, according to Margaret Riel (2001) that the learner “is actively engaged in the process of knowledge construction.”
Second, instruction must provide appropriate learning challenges and standards. Standards of student performance must be established so that students will know what is expected of them. Riel (2001) calls this being “Assessment Centered.” The curriculum needs to be matched to the classroom assessments. The assessments should flow out of the curriculum. In addition, the teachers must be what Riel (2001) terms “Knowledge Centered.” Teachers must have the knowledge base to be able to evaluate the essential skills and knowledge that students need in a particular discipline.
Third, instruction must accommodate needs and be supported in critical thinking and learning skills. Tishman et al. (1995) has identified four ways to help students develop higher order knowledge. These are to use real world examples; make comparisons across disciplines; encourage interaction by engaging students in problem solving activities or inquiry; finally, give positive feedback to students when they demonstrate the appropriate use of higher order knowledge that is relevant to the subject being studied. One way to support the development of critical thinking skills is through reflection and discussion.
Fourth, instruction should attend to the climate and context in which learning occurs. Recent brain research suggests, “The richness of early learning experiences affects the physical development of the brain and may be a major cause of intellectual development. If these new theories linking learning experiences with brain development come to be accepted, the optimal match between characteristics of the learner and the learning environment, rather than parental genetic code, might be seen as responsible for school success” (Riel, 2001). This means teachers must be concerned not only about children learning, but how they learn it. Teachers must increase an environment that targets a broad range of learning styles.