Student Teaching Portfolios: A Tool for Promoting Reflective Practice

The call to prepare teachers reflective about their practice is a dominant theme in recent teacher education literature. Zeichner and Tabachnick (1991) note, There is not a single teacher educator who would say that he or she is not concerned about preparing teachers who are reflective (p. 1). Countless definitions of reflection and ways to characterize the nature of reflective practice exist. Valli (1992), in her review of reflective teacher education programs, identified five distinct approaches to reflective teacher preparation: technical decision making, reflection-in-action, deliberative, personalistic, and critical. These differences notwithstanding, few would disagree with Richert's (1990) claim that The ability to think about what one does and why--assessing past actions, current situations, and intended outcomes--is vital to intelligent practice, practice that is reflective rather than routine. As the time in the teaching process when teachers stop to think about their work and make sense of it, reflection influences how one grows as a professional by influencing how successfully one is able to learn from one's experiences. Teacher education provides a starting point to instill the norm of reflective practice as well as to introduce the requisite knowledge and skills to approach teaching in a reflective way (p. 525). Teaching portfolios have recently received increasing attention as tools to promote reflection among both experienced and novice teachers. Theoretical support for portfolios as reflective tools is strong (Wolf, Whinery, & Hagerty, 1995). Proponents claim portfolios provide an opportunity and a structure for teachers to document and describe their teaching; articulate their professional knowledge; and reflect on what, how, and why they teach (e.g., Loughran & Corrigan, 1995; Wolf et al., 1995; Zubizarreta, 1994). Empirical support for these claims, however, is sparse: Although teacher portfolios have been tested by various groups as tools for assessment, portfolios have seldom been studied as a vehicle for teacher learning and growth (Athanases, 1994, p. 422; see also Wolf et al., 1995). The few published empirical studies of portfolios consistently argue that portfolios appear to foster teacher reflection. At the preservice level, for example, two investigations examined portfolio projects conducted within the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP). Portfolios helped student teachers to remember classroom events more fully and accurately, and focused their reflections on content and contents specific aspects of their teaching (Richert, 1990). They also created a need for student teachers to systematically examine their practice; encouraged them to gather information on their practice, their students, and their schools; and created a meaningful context in which to link the university and its research-based knowledge with the classroom and its practical demands (Lichtenstein, Rubin, & Grant, 1992). More recently, Loughran and Corrigan (1995) in a study of preservice teachers found portfolios useful either for encouraging reflection on practice or for helping in job interviews. Empirical investigations of portfolios within preservice teacher education are even more limited when we look beyond the question of impact. We found no studies explicitly addressing factors facilitating or hindering the process of portfolio construction. For teacher educators interested in incorporating student-teaching portfolios into their programs, information about enablers and hindrances to portfolio construction would be a valuable contribution to the literature. Portfolios and the Professional Seminar In fall 1994, the University of Colorado Denver incorporated student teaching portfolios as the major project for the School-based Professional Seminar taken concurrently with student teaching in the University of Colorado's Elementary Masters Plus Certification (MA+) Program. …