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. Identify a key concept from the subject discipline that you hope to teach. Describe ways that you could incorporate character education or service learning into a project, activity, or lesson designed to help students of the age you wish to teach learn the concept. For example, a description of the muscular system in science might include a short discussion about whether medieval European researchers who disobeyed national and religious laws forbidding autopsies and work with cadavers were justified in doing so for the sake of advancing science. (INTASC Principles 1, 4, 5, 6, and 7)
2. List several ways that you, as a teacher, can track the progress of your students' progress toward meeting state or district curriculum standards between formal standardized tests or grading periods. (INTASC Principles 7 and 8)
3. Identify a key concept from the subject discipline that you hope to teach. Plan a project, activity or lesson designed to help students of the age you wish to teach learn the concept. The plan should assume you have about 45 minutes. Now, create a similar plan that assumes you have 150 minutes (two and a half hours). Analyze the key differences between the two plans that stem from the alternative scheduling. (INTASC Principles 4, 5, and 6)