Using Teacher Portfolios to Enrich the Methods Course Experiences of Prospective Mathematics Teachers

School Science and Mathematics, Dec 2004 by Hartmann, Christopher

This paper illustrates ways to employ teacher portfolios to improve the quality of methods course experiences for prospective mathematics teachers. Based upon research conducted in an undergraduate teacher preparation program, this case study describes how the author used teacher portfolios to mentor prospective teachers in new ways. The case describes the author's experiences through a case study of his assessment of and response to one prospective teacher's portfolio. This portfolio illustrated themes that were present in other teachers' portfolios, but did so in ways that highlighted strategies for change to the methods course. Through the lens of this teacher's portfolio the author identified specific ways that the prospective teacher's beliefs were impacting her teaching practice, a result that enabled him to better help all of the teachers in the methods course reflect on their teaching. By providing a detailed account of the feedback process that led to this result, this paper illustrates how mathematics teacher educators can use prospective teachers' portfolios to enrich the quality of their methods courses.

The use of teacher portfolios in preparation programs for K-12 teachers creates new challenges and new responsibilities for mathematics teacher educators. One challenge identified by the research literature is to mentor prospective teachers in new ways (Andersen, 2000; Friedus, 1998). When teacher portfolios are required of prospective teachers, teacher educators must help them develop the knowledge and skills to construct a portfolio and to learn from this process (Carney, 2001; Delandshere & Arens, 2003). Several studies indicate that such portfolio mentoring is most effective when itprovides opportunities for prospective teachers to engage in dialogue about the contents of their portfolios (Borko, Michalec, Timmons, & Siddle, 1997; Carney, 2001; Dutt, Tallenco, & Kayler, 1997; Richert,1990).

Studies of experienced teachers also report that the portfolio process has a stronger impact on teachers' instructional practices when portfolios are used to supportprofessional dialogue (Darling-Hammond, Wise, & Klein, 1999; Jay, 2001). The case study described in this paper illustrates two ways that a teacher portfolio can enrich methods courses by supporting both mentoring practices that promote inquiry and professional dialogue amongst prospective mathematics teachers.

What Makes a Portfolio a Portfolio?

In fields such as the visual arts or architecture, where professional portfolios have long been used, portfolios serve as tools for professional development and for the assessment of practice. For instance, architects discuss a colleague's portfolio as a form of collective professional development, and schools of art employ the portfolio to make decisions for accepting candidates and for rewarding degrees. The participants in these practices engage in processes that shape their respective fields. They both define norms for practice and control access to (or advancement in) the profession (Goodman, 1976; Yinger, 1999). This impact results from practitioners' repeated engagement with professional portfolios as representations of practice. In these fields professional portfolios can be defined by the purposes they serve: (a)portfolios serve as a forum for professional learning through collegial engagement; and (b) portfolios can be used by experienced practitioners to assess a novice's qualification for professional practice.

For novice practitioners, such as the prospective mathematics teachers in this study, the teaching portfolio can serve both of these purposes simultaneously (Zeichner & Wray, 2001). This goal is accomplished when the construction of the portfolio is undertaken by prospective teachers as a process of rendering practice and the assessment regime for the portfolio has a formative purpose (Hartmann, 2003 ; Wineburg, 1997). As a rendering (Goodman, 1978), a portfolio artifact describes practice by both sampling evidence from and offering a portrayal of practice in terms of a framework, such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards (NCTM, 2000). When used in a course of study, such as a teacher preparation program, portfolio artifacts constructed in this way support teacher learning by enabling prospective teachers to engage with problems of professional practice (Borko et al., 1997; Jay, 2001; Kichert, 1990). Through the use of the portfolio to assess prospective teachers ' growth in light of their engagement with these problems, the teaching portfolio can be used to better prepare teachers for the profession by planning learning experiences that promote growth along a professional continuum (FeimanNemser, 2001; Hartmann, 2004; Zeichner, 2001).

Methods of Instruction and Inquiry

This study took place in an undergraduate teacher preparation program at a research university in the midwest region of the United States. In this program the prospective teachers completed all of their coursework with the same cohort of prospective teachers. Readers interested in a full description of the program are referred to Stephens (2003), who used this program as an exemplar of secondary mathematics teacher education in the United States.