Materials for Your Teaching Portfolio

Over the course of your teacher preparation program, you will create and collect many materials that you may wish to include in your teacher portfolio as evidence of your knowledge, skills, and attitudes for teaching. These materials should show that you meet the standards for new teachers developed by INTASC, the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium. The INTASC standards are available at http://www.ccsso.org/intascst.html#draft.

To help you begin developing materials for your portfolio, complete one or more of the following activities.

1. Use the web links for this chapter to research curriculum standards in your state for the subject matter and age of children you hope to teach. Choose one of the standards and design a plan for a project, activity, or lesson that would help students meet the standard. Include a description of how you would know whether or not students had mastered the standard. (INTASC Principles 1, 7, & 8)
2. Identify two or three key concepts from the discipline that you hope to teach (such as the introduction of fractions for mathematics, or perspective for art). Reflect on whether or not you believe cooperative learning strategies could help students learn it effectively. Choose one concept and describe in detail how you would use a cooperative learning strategy while teaching it to students. (INTASC Principles 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9)
3. Identify a key concept from the discipline that you hope to teach that should be learned by the students you hope to teach. (As a guide to which concepts should be mastered at which ages, you may wish to use the web links for this chapter to find state standards for the age of students you wish to teach.) Describe how you would be most likely to teach the concept to students, and, using Table 4.3 from your textbook as a guide, list several ways that you could differentiate your instruction as you taught the concept. (INTASC Principles 1, 3, 4, 5, and 7)