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.
- Identify a key concept from a subject discipline you hope to teach. Describe four approaches to helping students of the age you hope to teach learn the concept, based on the four major educational philosophies described in your textbook: perennialism, essentialism, romanticism, and progressivism. For example, what kind of lesson would a perennialist teacher use to help fourth-graders understand the idea of metaphor in language arts? What would a progressive instructor plan to help middle school students learn the rock cycle in earth science? (INTASC Principles 1, 2, 4, 7, and 9)
- Use the concept you identified for Activity 1, or identify a new one. Describe, or plan and create sample materials for, a project, activity, or lesson based on constructivist educational theory that would help students learn the concept. Include a description of what you, as a teacher, would do before, during and after the planned activity, and what students would do. What is the learning objective for the activity, and how will you know if students have achieved it? (INTASC Principles 1, 4, 6, 7, 8 and 9)
- Write a statement of your philosophy of education at this point in your teacher preparation. Keep this document handy, with your portfolio materials, to update as you learn and reflect throughout the program, and to guide you when you are ready to seek a position in a school whose philosophy fits with your own. (INTASC Principle 9)
