authentic assessment of teaching in context · authentic assessment of teaching in context linda...

*Corresponding author. Tel.: #1 650 723-3555; fax: #1 650723-7578.

E-mail address: [email protected] (L. Darling-Hammond).

Teaching and Teacher Education 16 (2000) 523}545

Authentic assessment of teaching in context

Linda Darling-Hammond!,*, Jon Snyder"

!Stanford University School of Education, CERAS 402, 520 Galvez Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA"University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Received 25 November 1998; received in revised form 9 July 1999; accepted 19 August 1999

Abstract

The demands of teaching more challenging content to more diverse learners suggest a need for teacher education thatenables teachers to become more sophisticated in their understanding of the e!ects of context and learner variability onteaching and learning. Instead of implementing set routines, teachers need to become ever more skillful in their ability toevaluate teaching situations and develop teaching responses that can be e!ective under di!erent circumstances. Thisarticle examines how a growing number of teacher education programs are using authentic assessments of teaching} cases, exhibitions, portfolios, and problem-based inquiries (or action research) } as tools to support teacher learning forthese new challenges of practice. Using speci"c teacher education programs as examples, the article examines how andwhy these strategies appear to provide support for teacher learning and avenues for more valid assessment of teaching.The authors also discuss circumstances in which these strategies may be less e!ective and suggest features of theassessments and programmatic contexts that are associated with more and less successful use. ( 2000 Elsevier ScienceLtd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Teacher assessment; Teacher education; Authentic assessment

Practitioners and researchers engaged in educa-tion reform suggest that teaching is becoming morecomplex in response to increasingly challengingcurriculum expectations and growing diversityamong students (Darling-Hammond, 1997;Shulman, 1987; Sizer, 1992). The process of teach-ing for understanding and application rather thanfor rote recall creates greater unpredictability inteaching as teachers must be able to understandand capitalize upon student thinking in order tomanage a process of knowledge construction that isdi!erent for each one. And as schools include

a greater range of students from di!erent back-grounds and with di!erent approaches to learning,formulas for teaching that do not take account ofstudents' experiences and needs are less and lesssuccessful (Darling-Hammond, 1997). Teacherswho want to teach diverse learners e!ectively mustaddress the distinctive resources each brings to thetable, including di!erent dispositions, prior experi-ences and knowledge, cultural and linguistic capi-tal, and sources of potential identi"cation andopposition (Doyle, 1979; Hollins, 1989; Moll, 1988).

The desire to succeed at much more ambitiouslearning goals with a much more diverse studentpopulation also creates new challenges for teacherpreparation. If all students pursued an identicalpath to understanding, learning might be ensuredby curricular design alone. Teachers could be

0742-051X/00/$ - see front matter ( 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.PII: S 0 7 4 2 - 0 5 1 X ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 1 5 - 9

prepared to implement curriculum using a reason-ably standard range of teaching techniques. How-ever, teaching that responds to human diversityand aims for cognitive #exibility requires a widerange of teaching strategies that are activated bysophisticated judgments grounded in disciplinedexperimentation, insightful interpretation of (oftenambiguous) events, and continuous re#ection. Thiskind of teaching aims to diagnose and make use ofvariability, rather than implement uniform tech-niques or routines.

This paper examines the growing use of teachereducation curriculum and assessment strategies in-tended to prepare teachers for these challenges. Anexpanding number of teacher education programsare using authentic assessments of teaching as oneset of tools to help novice teachers create, in a prin-cipled fashion, bridges from generalizations aboutpractice to apparently idiosyncratic, contextualizedinstances of learning. Under the title of authenticassessment, we include opportunities for develop-ing and examining teachers' thinking and actions insituations that are experience based and problemoriented and that include or simulate actual acts ofteaching. Such acts of teaching include plans forand re#ections on teaching and learning, as well asactivities featuring direct interaction with students.

Our reference to contextualized teaching andlearning is meant to underscore the fact that allteaching and all learning is shaped by the contextsin which they occur. These contexts are de"ned bythe nature of the subject matter, the goals of in-struction, the individual proclivities and under-standings of learners and teachers, and the settingswithin which teaching and learning take place.Such variables as school organization, resources,materials, amount of time and how it is structuredfor learning, the duration and nature of relation-ships among students and teachers, communitynorms and values in#uence the processes and out-comes of teaching decisions. The extent to whichcontext in#uences teaching } and determines whatkinds of approaches to teaching will be e!ective } isa factor that is increasingly acknowledged in re-search on teaching, in teacher education, and in theassessment of teaching.

Many teacher education programs, along withorganizations like the National Board for Profes-

sional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), have beenengaged over the past decade in developing assess-ments of teaching and learning that take theseissues of context into account. Cases, portfoliosthat assemble artifacts of practice, exhibitions ofperformance, and problem-based inquiries areamong the tools being used to try to capture impor-tant attributes of teaching and reasoning aboutteaching. These tools allow the application of the-oretical principles to problems in speci"c contextswhile appropriately complicating e!orts to drawgeneralizations about practice. In doing so, theymay also transform teachers' understandings ofboth theory and practice.

A small but growing body of research suggeststhat such strategies can help teachers understandmore deeply the many variables that in#uence theirwork. In the case of cases and portfolios that re-quire teachers to examine student learning in rela-tion to their teaching, for example, teachers claimthat the process of engaging in such analysis ulti-mately enriches their ability to understand the ef-fects of their actions and helps them better meet theneeds of diverse students (Athanases, 1994; Bliss& Mazur, 1997; Bradley, 1994; Darling-Hammond,1999; Haynes, 1995; Ingvarson & Marrett, 1997;Tracz et al., 1995). On the other hand, such assess-ments may achieve these outcomes only in certaincircumstances (for example, when they are designedin particular ways and/or used by teachers whohave already achieved certain kinds of skills orunderstandings), and they may have other limita-tions requiring attention from those who would usethem.

What do we know about cases, exhibitions, port-folios, and inquiries that appear to be powerful inpromoting teacher learning? What features of thesestrategies may contribute to the development ofteachers' professional judgement and to the morevalid assessment of teaching? Are there features ofsuch assessments that can undermine or enhancetheir potential for supporting or examining teacherlearning? In this paper, we describe how these auth-entic assessment tools are used in di!erent teachereducation programs to address some of the funda-mental dilemmas of learning to teach in a worldwhere many factors in#uence learning. We bringto bear evidence from a collection of recent case

524 L. Darling-Hammond, J. Snyder / Teaching and Teacher Education 16 (2000) 523}545

studies of extraordinary teacher education pro-grams conducted by the National Commission onTeaching and America's Future, as well as evidenceabout other programs recently reported in the liter-ature. Beyond our descriptions of these approaches} each of which is widely used in many otherteacher education programs } we examine how thenature of the assessment strategy appears to shapeand re#ect the learning of prospective teachers andtheir capabilities as teachers.

1. A rationale for contextualized assessmentof teaching

A major problem of teaching and teacher educa-tion is the problem of moving from intellectualunderstanding to enactment in practice (Kennedy,1999). The problem of enactment, especially in lightof current expectations for teaching, is not trivial.As Villegas (1997) notes:

Because teaching must build upon and modifystudents' prior knowledge, responsive teachersselect and use instructional materials that arerelevant to students' experiences outside school(Hollins, 1989), design instructional activitiesthat engage students in personally and culturallyappropriate ways (Garibaldi, 1992; Irvine, 1990),make use of pertinent examples or analogiesdrawn from the students' daily lives to introduceor clarify new concepts (Irvine, 1992), manage theclassroom in ways that take into considerationdi!erences in interaction styles (Tikuno!, 1985),and use a variety of evaluation strategies thatmaximize students' opportunities to displaywhat they actually know in ways that are familiarto them (Moll, 1988; Ortiz & Maldonado-Colon,1986) (p. 265).

Teaching in ways that are responsive to studentsrequires that teachers be able to engage in system-atic learning from teaching contexts as well as frommore generalized theory about teaching and learn-ing. Without an understanding of how culture, ex-perience, readiness, and context in#uence howpeople grow, learn, and develop, it is di$cult forteachers to make good judgements about how to

deal with the speci"c events in the classroom. How-ever, without an appreciation for the intense,interactive realities of classroom life, and for themultidimensional problems and possibilities posedby individual learners, it is di$cult for the theoret-ically knowledgeable to apply what they know inpractice. It is both more di$cult to develop suchabilities and to evaluate them than it is to assumea single approach to teaching or a single rightanswer to teaching problems. Those who haveworked to develop assessments of such complexperformances argue that traditional paper and pen-cil measures and low-inference observation toolsare insu$ciently context sensitive to assess teach-ing that is e!ective for diverse learners (Darling-Hammond, Wise & Klein, 1998; Haertel, 1990;Shulman, 1987).

Studies of the predictive validity of traditionalmultiple-choice paper and pencil tests of teaching(for example, the National Teacher Examinations)have found little evidence that such tests are corre-lated with teacher ratings or teachers' classroome!ectiveness (Andrews, Blackmon & Mackey, 1980;Ayers & Qualls, 1979; Haney, Madaus & Kreitzer,1987; Quirk, Witten & Weinburg, 1973.) One rea-son for the lack of predictive validity may be thatthe ability to recognize information when it is pre-sented in a list of responses is signi"cantly di!erentfrom the ability to produce the same kind of analy-sis or to enact corresponding ideas in practice.Another reason may be that the tests in use havefeatured decontextualized teaching scenarios(Darling-Hammond, 1986) and have not represent-ed core tasks of teaching in ways that accuratelyre#ect their conduct in classrooms, including theintegration of multiple strands of knowledge andskill (Haertel, 1990; Shulman, 1987).

Systems of teacher observation in classroomsare, in one way, potentially more authentic. Theydo, in fact, look at teaching as it is being enacted.However, the generation of low-inference ratingsystems developed in the 1980s presumed a singleshort list of observable teaching behaviors thatcould be deemed `e!ectivea (e.g. keeps a brisk paceof instruction, manages routines, develops behav-ioral objectives) and could be tallied from count-able indicators. These approaches did not addressimportant di!erences in context and content, and

L. Darling-Hammond, J. Snyder / Teaching and Teacher Education 16 (2000) 523}545 525

1The programs are at Alverno College, Milwaukee, WI; BankStreet College, New York, NY; Trinty University, San Antonio,TX; University of California, Berkeley; University of SouthernMaine; University of Virginia; and Wheelock College, Boston,MA.

they ignored the in#uence of teaching on learning.Because e!ective teachers vary their behaviorsacross teaching situations, evaluation results basedon low-inference behavioral instruments have lowgeneralizability (Shavelson & Dempsey-Atwood,1976; Stodolsky, 1984). Furthermore, the lists ofteaching behaviors proved to have questionablerelationship to other measures of teaching e!ec-tiveness. Context-related di!erences in the out-comes associated with a given list of behaviorsproduced inconsistent "ndings in process-productstudies and undermined con"dence in simple trans-lations of results into teacher evaluation instru-ments (Darling-Hammond et al., 1998).

Some studies have found that teachers who learnto teach to decontextualized evaluation tools con-structed around a set list of teaching behaviorsconsider a narrower range of teaching concerns(Hoover & O'Shea, 1987). In addition, they are lesslikely to attend to issues of curriculum planning, ofcontent pedagogy, of the relationship between theirpractices and student responses or outcomes, or toteaching tasks that fall outside of the observationcontext (Darling-Hammond & Sclan, 1992; French,Hodzkom & Kuligowski, 1990). As Floden andKlinzing (1990) note: `Training teachers to followa "xed set of prescriptions discourages teachersfrom adapting their instruction to the particularsubjects and students they are teaching. Hence,the instructional e!ectiveness of teachers givensuch training is unlikely to be at a high levela(pp. 16, 17).

There is growing interest among educators andevaluators in constructing other forms of assess-ment that better re#ect the complexity of teachingand can provide valid data about competence whilehelping teachers improve the caliber of their workwith children and their families. In the rest of thisarticle we describe several approaches to the auth-entic assessment of teaching and describe how thesepractices are currently being used in pre-serviceteacher education programs in the United States.We provide data on the perceived e!ects of thesetools on candidates and programs, and we con-clude the paper with a discussion of key practice,research, and policy issues arising from the useof authentic assessment in teacher educationprograms.

The group of programs described here is neitherrandom nor representative, but illustrative of insti-tutions that have relatively highly developed practi-ces in this area. It derives from two sources. Onesource of information is a study of seven extraordi-narily e!ective teacher education programs con-ducted for the National Commission on Teachingand America's Future (Darling-Hammond, 2000).1These programs were selected through reputationalsampling from scholars and practitioners in the"eld, surveys of graduates and employers (in com-parison to a random sample of beginning teachersin the United States), and observations of grad-uates. The programs show evidence of regularlyproducing teachers who are unusually well-pre-pared to work e!ectively with diverse learners. Thestudy found that among the practices the programshave in common is the extensive use of cases, port-folios, exhibitions, and action research inquiries astools for developing and assessing teaching skills.A second source of program information is theliterature on assessment in teacher education whichprovides evidence about practices and potentialoutcomes of some well-described examples. Thisliterature also suggests that the practices describedhere are becoming increasingly commonplace inteacher education programs, although strategiesfor using them certainly vary. As a consequence, itseems timely to consider how these approachesoperate, why programs "nd them useful, and whatfeatures may be important to their success in devel-oping and assessing context-sensitive teaching.

2. A framework for de5ning authentic assessmentof teaching

Below we outline four aspects of authentic as-sessment of teaching that appear from emergingresearch to be important both for measuring teach-ing and enhancing candidates' abilities to teachwell.


1. Assessments sample the actual knowledge,skills, and dispositions desired of teachers as they areused in teaching and learning contexts, rather thanrelying on more remote proxies. Although some con-texts for assessment may be a step removed fromdaily classroom life, the tasks undertaken requirethe integration and use of knowledge and skills asthey are employed in practice. Assessment tasksinclude actual examples of the work of teaching(videotapes of teaching, plans, and assessments ofstudent learning, for example) and analyses ofteaching, learning, and curriculum or materials.Such assessments seek, to varying degrees, to dealwith the problem of enactment; that is, the fact thattalking or writing about teaching, or recognizinganswers to questions about teaching, cannot fullypredict a person's capacity to succeed in the com-plex realities of actual teaching in the classroom.This criterion re#ects the common sense notionthat if one wants to assess a performance skill likeswimming, for example, it is useful to have theswimmer in the water at some point.

It is, perhaps, worth re-emphasizing that theauthentic assessment of teaching does not consistentirely of classroom observation. Many aspects ofteaching are only indirectly visible during the class-room portion of a teacher's practice. These includeplanning regarding how to represent content andhow to adapt lessons to the needs of particularlearners, work with children and their families andthe community outside of classroom hours, ana-lyses of the special strengths and challenges stu-dents possess, and work with colleagues on theplanning and integration of instruction and on stu-dent and school-level problem solving, to name buta few. In these cases, classroom observations areactually remote proxies for the actual knowledge,skills, and dispositions to be assessed. Therefore,assessment tools such as interviews, teacher re#ec-tions and analyses, samples of feedback the teacherprovided students and/or that others provided theteacher, and other artifacts that represent theseaspects of practice may better meet the underlyingprinciple of authentic assessment.

2. Assessments require the integration of multiplekinds of knowledge and skill as they are used inpractice. One complaint about traditional teachereducation has been that students experience frag-

mentation among courses that treat di!erent sub-ject matter (content and pedagogy, for example, orlearning, curriculum, and assessment, for another)as well as fragmentation in occasions for dealingwith theory and practice (see, e.g. Goodlad, 1990).This leaves much of the task of assembling a know-ledge base for teaching to the student, with result-ing gaps and problems of translation. Proponentsof new approaches argue that assessments that mir-ror teaching by seeking to integrate areas of know-ledge used in combination can help forge theseconnections while better representing the tasksteachers must actually perform (Darling-Ham-mond et al., 1998).

In addition, use of such assessments may shapeprofessional preparation programs in ways thatencourage better integration of knowledge withinand across courses and other learning experiences.So, for example, an assessment of a child's literacydevelopment might rely upon study of research andtheory about literacy development, learning, cur-riculum, and assessment; instruction in the use ofliteracy assessment tools and instructional strat-egies; practice and coaching in the collection andanalysis of data about children's literacy learning;and re#ection upon the data collected, its meaning,and implications for instruction. Incorporatingsuch assessments into the ongoing curriculum ofteacher preparation may heighten the probabilitythat knowledge and skills will be better integratedand applied and that complex assessments will be-come practically feasible. If such assessments aretreated largely as add-ons at the end of a course orprogram rather than as integral components ofongoing curriculum and instruction, the time,labor, and expense of conducting them could be-come overwhelming within the institutionalconstraints of teacher education programs. Thiscondition also helps to ensure that the necessaryopportunities for learning are present, thus enhanc-ing the probabilities of success.

3. Multiple sources of evidence are collected overtime and in diverse contexts. There are two principlesunderlying this criterion. The "rst is that assess-ments that support sound decisions require evid-ence based on adequate samples of thinking andbehavior. An isolated sample of performance ora single genre of data is insu$cient to inform


judgements about learning, teaching, programdevelopment, or candidate competence. Robustassessments of knowledge and skill, like those of theNational Board for Professional Teaching Stan-dards, can include written analyses, observationdata (e.g., from a supervisor's, cooperatingteacher's, or principal's observation), and perfor-mance samples such as videotapes, samples of stu-dent work from the student teacher's classroom,and samples of communications with families. Notonly is the multiplicity of data sources importantbut the ways in which they are assembled is alsocritical. To understand a classroom event, oneneeds relevant information about students andtheir prior learning and approaches as well asabout the event itself and about the teacher's deci-sion-making processes } i.e. what goals she is tryingto achieve and what aspects of content, studentneeds, and classroom or community context she istaking into account. In addition, since context doesmatter, assessments should provide candidates withopportunities to show their abilities in di!erentsettings, with di!erent students, and with di!erentlesson content. If teacher education is professionaleducation, it should prepare candidates to take intoaccount the di!erent needs of students and de-mands of subject matter and other context vari-ables when they are making decisions. Theconscious e!ort of di!erentiating and analyzing thefactors represented in di!erent settings for practiceis what distinguishes preparation for professionalpractice from an apprenticeship model in whichnovices aim to copy the skills of a veteran practi-tioner, as though they will be applicable in allcontexts. The literacy assessment described abovecould meet this criterion, if candidates completed ita second time in a di!erent context with a child ofdi!erent needs and abilities. Explicitly recognizingthe importance of context di!erences in assess-ments could help candidates develop more "nelytuned perceptual and analytic abilities, reinforcethe development of more professionally orientedand context-sensitive preparation programs, andadvance the representation of di!erent socioculturaland other contexts in performance assessments.

4. Assessment evidence is evaluated by individualswith relevant expertise against criteria that matter forperformance in the xeld. This criterion acknow-

ledges that the bases for making inferences from anassessment are as important to its validity as is theassessment task itself. Two people looking at thesame evidence base might draw entirely di!erentconclusions about its meaning if they have di!erentlevels or kinds of expertise or if they are applyingdi!erent expectations for what constitutes a goodor competent performance. Newly developedperformance assessments like those used by theNational Board for Professional Teaching Stan-dards or the Interstate New Teacher Assessmentand Support Consortium (INTASC) are developedaround standards for accomplished practice thatre#ect current research in the "eld and are scoredby individuals with demonstrated expertise in thesubject matter area and level of the candidate beingassessed. A defensible basis for creating expert con-sensus about the meaning of teaching events orstrategies is an important component of a perfor-mance assessment that can be used to evaluate orto guide the development of teaching skills.

Within the context of teacher education, onemight posit a "fth requirement for authentic assess-ments that aim to develop as well as measure teach-ing judgement and skill: that the assessmentpractice includes multiple opportunities for learn-ing and practicing the desired outcomes and forfeedback and re#ection. This criterion re#ectsa new expectation for the purposes of assessment:that is, that it helps develop competence, not justmeasure outcomes (Darling-Hammond et al.,1998). If one believes that a teacher is not some-thing one becomes but rather something one isconstantly becoming, then a core function ofteacher education is to increase the ability of candi-dates to re#ect upon and learn from teaching. As-sessments of the work of a teacher that includeopportunities for learning from feedback and re-#ection both support the development of greaterlevels of competence and measure a critical at-tribute of an e!ective teacher; the ability to learnfrom practice.

3. Tools for authentic assessment

We examine four tools that, in certain circum-stances, meet the conditions outlined above: cases,


exhibitions of performance, portfolios, and prob-lem-based inquiries (also known as action re-search). Each provides a means for organizingcurriculum and instruction in a teacher educationprogram as well as for assessing prospectiveteachers' developing abilities. No single one ofthese tools represents the totality of teaching.Each, however, assesses important aspects of teach-ing and, in interesting ways, re#ects a di!erentmetaphor for teaching. Cases, for example, developand assess teachers' abilities as decision makers.Exhibitions draw upon the performances of teach-ing and re#ect the teacher as an artist. Portfoliossupport the teacher as a continuous learnerwho re#ects on practice. Research and inquirydevelop teachers as social science analysts. Usedin combination, as many teacher education pro-grams employ them, such tools allow novicesto integrate di!erent areas of learning and toapply them in di!erent ways that, together, in-clude many dimensions of a professional teachingrole.

A counter image is that of the beginning teacheras a #oundering navigator, someone whoseentry into teaching is a sink or swim a!air. Re-search on teacher development (Fuller, 1969;Katz, 1972) has suggested that beginning teachersmay not be capable of advanced practice until theysuccessfully move through concerns related to rudi-mentary survival and classroom management.However, the experience of highly successful pro-grams using these highly sca!olded tools for devel-oping and assessing teaching suggests thatbeginning professionals are capable of much moresophisticated practice than previously thought(Darling-Hammond, 2000; Darling-Hammond& Macdonald, 1999; Koppich, 1999; Lippincott,1999; Merseth & Koppich, 1999; Miller & Sil-vernail, 1999; Snyder, 1999; Whitford, Ruscoe& Fickel, 1999; Zeichner, 1999). The caliber ofthe work generated by teacher candidates in pro-grams where study is both rooted in practiceand unremittingly analytic suggests that the con-cerns of beginning professionals can move morequickly from a focus on self to a focus on stu-dents when they have tools to help them traintheir sights on the e!ects of their actions anddecisions.

3.1. Cases

In the preface to their book on The Case forEducation, Colberg, Trimble and Desberg (1996)note that the growing interest in using casemethods in teacher education can be explainedwith one word: `Contexta. Cases add context totheory. Whether they take the form of case reports} "rst-person narratives of personal experiences ofteaching } or case studies } third person analyses ofsituations or students } cases allow the explorationof precepts, principles, theories, and perennialissues as they actually occur in the real world.Students may read and analyze cases, seeking thelessons and insights they o!er, or they may writetheir own cases, developing interpretations ofevents as they work through the process of repres-enting their experience. These e!orts can motivatelearning, serve as instructional material for others,and provide `antidotes to the dangers of over-generalizationa (Shulman, 1992, p. 3). Typically,cases represent instances of teaching and learningthat pose dilemmas, provide carefully assembledevidence or data, and, sometimes, describe the out-comes of various decisions in speci"c situations.Contexts for cases may be de"ned by the nature ofthe subject matter and students; the history ofa class, an event, or an individual; and the situ-ations observed or strategies attempted.

Some cases provide visions of the possible } com-pelling sagas that can inspire and guide. Othercases describe the collision between design andchance and the surprises that are the essence ofteaching experience. Cases may be developed fromany number of perspectives. For instance, they maystart from a subject matter perspective, probingteachers' understandings of curriculum and instruc-tion by examining how teachers con"gure and ana-lyze learning experiences aimed at the mastery ofcertain skills and content in light of student needsand classroom conditions. They may also arisefrom a student perspective, assessing teachers'knowledge and their skills of observation and inter-pretation by examining how teachers evaluate stu-dent learning and development in terms ofstrengths, interests, and needs. They may start froma cultural perspective, allowing teachers to inquireinto students' lives and contexts in order to prepare


teachers for the intellectually and emotionally de-manding experiences that can arise in culturallydiverse classrooms and communities.

Proponents argue that, through careful analysisof cases and the inevitable puzzles that must beaddressed between aspiration and accomplishment,teacher candidates develop theories and strategies.Skeptics may be concerned that highly contex-tualized accounts of seemingly idiosyncratic situ-ations may fail to add up to more principledunderstanding of teaching concerns, or that the useof cases may add only to the lore of teaching deci-sions based on personal opinions uninformed bybroader professionwide knowledge. This legitimateconcern suggests that the utility of cases as tools forteaching or assessment may depend substantiallyon what kinds of readings, discussions, analyses,and commentaries are wrapped around them asthey are constructed or evaluated.

3.2. Using cases

In the use of cases, teacher candidates eitherreceive or construct context-speci"c narrativesabout students, teaching events, or teaching andlearning environments; then they analyze and inter-pret those narratives in the light of other know-ledge from research, theory, and experience. Whenteachers read well-wrought cases, they may betterunderstand certain principles or prototypic dilem-mas of teaching that are consciously embedded inthe case and made analyzable by the variables andevents that are presented. When teachers or teachercandidates construct cases themselves, the writingof the case helps the writer learn to move betweenlevels of abstraction: to understand the relationshipbetween concrete details and larger principles orissues. The opportunity for this to happen is en-hanced if there is an interactive process of reviewand commentary that pushes the writer to explorethe deeper meanings of the case and its relationshipto other knowledge in the "eld.

As Shulman (1992, 1996) describes, the initialexperience of the case writer is a "rst-order experi-ence with all the power of any intense encounterwith reality. A "rst-order experience, however,lacks distanced examination and does not necessar-ily relate experience in a way that easily yields its

meaning. As the case writer encodes the experienceinto narrative, the process requires re#ection aboutwhat occurred. A process of review and revision,particularly when the reviewer(s) brings broaderexpertise to bear and when the revision processcalls upon research and theory that can illuminatethe problematics of the case, explores and elabor-ates the meanings of the event. When written andshared, the narrative product becomes a second-order experience in two ways. First, it is no longerthe experience itself but rather a reconstruction ofthe experience in language; second, once it isrecorded in language, the `experiencea becomeavailable to a community of peers and colleagues.At the point it is disseminated, the case becomesa third-order experience, because the meaning ofthe narrative now resides in the community. In thisway, as they do in law, business, medicine, andother professions, cases bridge the gap betweenpersonal situated knowledge and sharable, general-izable knowledge. The assessment of a case createdby a teacher rests on the ability of the case-writer toconnect information about teaching events, stu-dents, or situations to a broader body of knowledgeabout learning, teaching, development, culture, mo-tivation, behavior and contextual in#uences on allof these.

This ideal process may not always occur, thuslimiting the usefulness of cases for either teachingor assessing a candidate's abilities to make sense ofteaching events or to share them in a manner thathas broader professional utility. There are at leasttwo potential dangers. First, a case writer's or caseuser's limited knowledge or narrow frame of refer-ence may lead to an analysis that misdiagnoses thenature of the problem, misunderstands or ignoresthe salient context variables, or fails to recognizepotentially productive strategies for `solvinga oraddressing the issues raised in the case. Second, thecase writer or case user may be unable to generalizefrom the single instance represented in the case toa well-grounded set of principles for interpretationor practice, either because he or she is unfamiliarwith a broader knowledge base or does not under-stand how to access and apply this knowledge tothe situation under study. When the case is used asan instructional tool, a failure to o!set these prob-lems through relevant readings and interpretive


discussion, it could be argued, may misinstruct thecase user or developer about the meaning of thesituation under study or about principles for prac-tice and their application in speci"c contexts. Whena case analysis is used for assessment purposes, theability of the assessor to discern and apply therelevant interpretive knowledge is critical to a validassessment process. Without this lens, cases mayadd up to little more than interesting but uninstruc-tive teaching stories that reinforce uninformed oridiosyncratic practice. The examples below illus-trate e!orts to construct educative cases that avoidthese problems.

3.3. A case analysis of curriculum

One example of this process is the work done byteacher candidates at Stanford University, whodevelop curriculum cases as part of a course onPrinciples of Learning for Teaching. While readingand discussing learning theories in relation toteaching strategies, students write a case abouta teaching event in which they have encountereddi$culty achieving one of their curricular goalswith their students. The case is reviewed on twoseparate occasions by both a peer and an instruct-or, who pose questions and possible hypotheses,raise issues and suggest other literature that mayshed light on the teaching situation under study.The revisions of the case help the student teacherthink more deeply about his experience from mul-tiple perspectives and evaluate a number of poten-tial sources of as well as solutions for the teachingdilemma in question.

Shulman (1996, p. 204) describes one of thesecases: a narrative drama in three acts written byteacher education student Mark Ellis while he wasworking in a geometry class trying to help hisstudents understand the concept of `pia. Ellis knewthat all his students had already encountered pi inprevious classrooms. He soon discovered, however,that his students' understanding of pi was asa memorized set of digits, `an arbitrary constantwith no discernible reason other than that someGreek said several thousand years agoa. Markwanted his students to understand that pi is insteada ratio that is based on the universal, unchangingrelationship among the circumference, diameter,

and area of a circle. To help them understand ratioand proportion, Mark designed demonstrationsand discussions of scale models, architectural draw-ings, maps, and other artifacts in which the ideas ofscale and proportionality are central. The "rst actthus consists of an analysis of the complexity of thesubject matter concepts as well as of instructionalreasoning and strategies.

In the second act, Mark's narrative describeshow his plans played out in the classroom. Some-times the students seemed not to understand evenvery rudimentary ideas. At other times, his exam-ples and exercises seemed magical. He wondered ifhis students really understood or were exception-ally adept at framing comprehension. Whenstudents completed their "nal essay examinationthat included an open-ended question on the mean-ing of pi, he anxiously awaited the results. Studyingtheir answers, his heart sank. Only two responsesre#ected more than a super"cial understanding ofpi.

The third act does not tie up the loose ends likea thirty-minute situation comedy. Mark did notre-teach pi and his students live happily ever after.Rather he carefully analyzed student responses,re#ected upon his assumptions and anticipations,and developed a theory that accounted for his ex-perience. His theory was that the persistence of thestudents' prior knowledge of pi was greater than heanticipated. From that theory he suggested alterna-tive strategies he predicted would be more likely tomodify prior misconceptions. As a tool for hisdevelopment, the case allowed Mark to examine hisexperience in light of theories of learning and per-formance. Other novice and veteran teachers maynow also use it as an example of the e!ects ofpreconceptions on learning. As a tool for assess-ment, the case allowed Mark's teachers to examinehis ability to bring together his understanding ofthe in#uence of prior knowledge on student under-standing and his personal re#ections on his ownand his students' intentions and actions.

3.4. A case study of a child

Another approach is the development of casestudies in which the author is not the main prota-gonist or actor but functions instead as a


researcher. The case study can focus on a classroomor school situation or on a particular student.When students are the objects of inquiry, the casestudy can help teachers learn to apply knowledge ofdevelopment, learning, motivation, and behavior tospeci"c children as they function in their family,school, and community contexts. Teacher educa-tion programs like Bank Street College (seeDarling-Hammond & Macdonald, 1999) andColumbia University's Teachers College engagetheir students in conducting child and adolescentcase studies to help them link theories of learningand development to observation of actual children.The goal of such case studies is to examine studentlearning and development with an eye toward iden-tifying strengths, developmental progress, impor-tant in#uences, and needs. Collecting and analyzingdata for the case study } from observations, inter-views, records, and analyses of student work } helpsteachers develop their skills of observation anddocumentation and their ability to analyze howchildren learn and how speci"c children can besupported in the process of development.

In this kind of case, the narrative explicates withdetailed examples a young person's thinking, learn-ing, interactions, beliefs, concerns, and aspirations.The plot is biographical, creating a theory of theperson rather than of an event. In some instances,child case studies can be the basis for evaluatinghow better to work with a child who is havingdi$culty. Written versions of such studies codifywhat is done by teachers in action when they indi-vidually evaluate a student using multiple tools ofevidence, or when teachers collectively participatein a descriptive review of a child in which they pooltheir observations to "gure out how better to sup-port him or her. Like case conferences in medicine,these reviews are build on careful, detailed observa-tion and shared expertise aimed at more powerfulanalysis of a situation.

A vivid example of this kind of analytic child casestudy is provided in the account of Akeem, a thirdgrade student who entered Susan Gordon's class-room in a New York City elementary school afterhaving been expelled for throwing a desk ata teacher in another school (Darling-Hammond,Ancess & Falk, 1995, pp. 217}224). The case beginsby describing Akeem's frequent outbursts, his ef-

forts to disrupt classroom meetings, and his period-ically surly or aggressive behavior. It continues bydescribing Gordon's e!orts to document, usingmany tools of observation and assessment, exactlywhen these outbursts occurred, and her discoverythat Akeem's misbehavior tended to occur whencertain kinds of academic tasks arose. She con-cluded that Akeem's actions seemed designed tode#ect attention from the fact that he could notread well or write with any ease. The case providesa detailed description of Susan's e!orts, with hercolleagues, to discover what Akeem does do well, toprovide opportunities for him to build upon hisstrengths, and to develop strategies for addressinghis speci"c literacy needs.

Susan allowed Akeem to work in hands-onlearning centers that tapped his artistic skills andhis abilities to construct machines and models. Shefound him books and developed writing assign-ments that built on these interests, while systemati-cally teaching him new strategies for reading. Asthe case unfolds, Akeem develops architecturaldrawings and sophisticated comic books which helater annotates and turns into books; he is recog-nized by peers for his artistic and mechanical abil-ities and begins to gain status in the classroom; hejoins classroom activities with increasing enthusi-asm; and, not incidentally, he learns to read andwrite. The case follows Akeem until he "nishesmiddle school with a solid academic record, nearperfect attendance, and admission into a special-ized high school for the arts.

This kind of case provides novices with an illus-tration of how to collect evidence about students'learning and behavior in light of broader know-ledge about both; how to diagnose learning needs;and how to build a set of teaching strategies thataddresses these needs. When novices constructtheir own case studies of children, they engage insimilar kinds of diagnostic thinking and in an integ-ration of information from many perspectives: cog-nitive, social, emotional, and physical. Such caseanalyses are most powerful when they are directlytied to the formal study of development, so thatinterpretation is guided by the literature and stu-dents have a basis for understanding what they areseeing. Even if the story line is not as dramatic, thecase construction process enables novices to learn


how to apply theoretical knowledge to concreteexamples, and the case provides a basis for evaluat-ing their ability to do so.

3.5. A case analysis of teaching decisions in context

A third approach uses cases to highlight issues ofteaching context. For example, the Teachers forAlaska Program at the University of Alaska,Fairbanks uses cases to explore concerns of multi-cultural teaching in local contexts. Cases in thisprogram o!er students a preview of situations theymay encounter in their teaching careers; providedescriptions of strategies successful teachers use inhandling these special situations; and help novicesdevelop tools for handling the `messy dilemmasthat require all the imagination, intellectualresources, and tact at a teacher's commanda(Kleinfeld, 1998, p. 145).

Teachers for Alaska replaced the traditional se-quence of foundation courses and methods coursesfollowed by student teaching with a program or-ganized around curriculum blocks, each of whichemphasizes the study of a case that is thematicallyrelated to the subject matter being taught. Thecases consist of actual situations confronted byteachers in the culturally diverse classrooms andcommunities of Alaskan villages. They are modeledon the `dilemmasa approach to case method teach-ing used by the Harvard Business School to pre-pare practitioners for action in complex anduncertain contexts (Christensen & Hansen, 1987).These cases introduce students to the `tangledissues of teaching in remote villages } the simmer-ing animosities between local people and high-paidoutsiders, unfamiliar cultural rules that newteachers could unwittingly violate, the organizationof power in village communities, the injustices theeducational system has visited on villagers, andalso the injustices visited on outside teachersa(Kleinfeld, 1998, p. 142).

The teaching cases consist of two parts. Part oneposes the dramatic problem nested within a web ofrelated issues. For instance, one case begins witha classroom "ght between an Eskimo student andan Anglo student. As the case develops, the teacherrealizes the "ght is related to the Anglo student'scutting remark about the Eskimo students' work

(`D minus, huh?a). Later the teacher discovers thatthe Eskimo student's interpretation of this remarkcuts to the core of his identity. `He thinks I amdumb because I am nativea. The case also developssuch contextual issues as the stress of culture fa-tigue, the hostility of the local community, and lackof support from school administration. In the case,the teacher considers such pedagogical and ethicalissues as: What is a fair grading system in anEnglish class where some students are children of`outside professionalsa and native speakers ofEnglish while others are Yup'ik-speaking childrenof subsistence hunters? What alternative gradingoptions might be considered? How can competencebe supported and recognized? The case presentsteaching problems not as prepackaged, neatly sol-ved exercises but as di$cult issues to be explored.The critical task for students in their discussion ofthe cases, as in teaching, is "rst to understand therange of considerations and from that understand-ing to determine what to tackle and what to ignore.

Part two of the case shows how experiencedteachers go about addressing the issues raised inthe "rst part. The advantage of part two is that itfeatures speci"c strategies that candidates can con-sider using themselves. In the above example, forinstance, the teacher revises his grading system withindividualized goals for each student and gradesstudents on their success in meeting their individ-ualized goals. He creates a bulletin board entitled`The Theme is Excellencea to post students' work,pictures of them doing homework, and articlesabout their parents from the local newspaper. Withother teacher colleagues, he organizes a communityrelations campaign with a poster showing anEskimo mother with a baby superimposed overa classroom of students. The caption reads, `WETEACH2 the children you lovea. In keeping withthe program's keep-it-messy theme, this case endswith a paradox: the teacher `burns outa and leavesthe community. During the program, studentswrite a case from their own student teaching experi-ence. Many of these cases become part of the cur-riculum for the program the following year. Theyprovide a base for assessing students' success atunderstanding their work in a multicultural contextand for developing productive strategies for reach-ing their students.


2The following discussion draws primarily upon a study ofAlverno's teacher education program by Ken Zeichner (1999)and upon Alverno College program documents.

The case-based approach, coupled with carefullystructured coursework and clinical experiences, ap-pears to make a di!erence for candidates' learning.Evaluations of the Teachers for Alaska Programshow measurable improvement in students' cross-cultural teaching skills from the point of entry untilgraduation. In a recent evaluation, at the end oftheir "rst semester on campus and again after theirstudent teaching experiences in the villages, trainedobservers documented sample lessons graduatestaught with culturally diverse students. At theirentry into the program, 28% of the candidates tookinto account culturally di!erent students' frame ofreference. At the program midpoint, 62% did so. Atthe end of the program, 83% did so. At programinception, 12% of the candidates took into accountthe students' vocabulary and speech patterns, whileat the program midpoint, 31% did so, and at theprogram end, 46% did so. Other measures } suchas the use of active teaching strategies rather thanlecturing } showed similar changes (Kleinfeld,1998). Examining and practicing teaching in cul-tural and community context may indeedstrengthen teachers' abilities to take account oftheir students.

While such cases may be extremely valuable,they need to be constructed with great care, so thatthey avoid the risk of inadvertently stereotypingstudents or situations, or attributing to cultural orother characteristics of students behaviors that mayhave other origins. An example of a case that mayillustrate this problem is one written to describe anencounter between a young, white, untrained "rstyear teacher with a group of black male students inher class who did not obey her directives (Skolnick,1995). Characterized by the case writer as a prob-lem of gender and authority, the encounter could aseasily have emerged because of the teacher's peda-gogical fumbling, her use of an authoritarian disci-pline plan that relied on confrontation rather thanmutually negotiated goals, her failure to see oraddress the relationship between one of the stu-dent's poor reading skills and his behavior whencalled upon to read, or her own race-based insecur-ities with the students in her class. Thus a case thatseems to suggest "rmer disciplinary action as theanswer to a troubling classroom situation may de-#ect student teachers' attention from important

pedagogical concerns. One strategy for vettingcases to test the range of interpretations is to seekout experts with diverse specializations and per-spectives to evaluate the cases and write commen-taries about them. This strategy has been used inrecent casebooks (see e.g. Shulman & Lotan, 1998)to increase con"dence in the case interpretations.

4. Exhibitions of performance

While cases provide sites for the analysis ofteaching decisions and outcomes, exhibitionsof performance directly address the problem ofenactment. Exhibitions allow teachers to demon-strate particular abilities in ways that include orclosely simulate teaching contexts or events. Ex-hibitions can draw upon tools such as observationsor videotapes of teaching, artifacts like teachingplans, or even group activities that simulate whatteachers do when solving problems of practice withcolleagues. The distinguishing feature of an exhibi-tion that di!erentiates it from an unguided obser-vation of practice is that it allows the evaluation ofthese abilities in relation to articulated standards ofpractice.

4.1. Dexning standards of practice

The teacher education program at AlvernoCollege2 uses frequent exhibitions of performance,benchmarked against standards, as the foundationfor much of its work. The goals of the program areexpressed by overarching themes that treat the de-velopmental needs of learners; an appreciation fordiversity; a view of professionalism that includesongoing inquiry to inform teaching; a concern fordemocratic education; and a commitment to theuse of media and technology. The College's curricu-lum is built upon opportunities for students tomaster a set of eight general education abilities(expected of all students in the college) and "veadvanced education abilities (speci"c to teacher


education students). Alverno's de"nition of abilitiesincludes `a complex integration of knowledge, be-haviors, skills, values, attitudes, and self-percep-tionsa (Diez, Rickard & Lake, 1994, p. 9). Thegeneral education abilities include: communication;analysis; problem solving; valuing in decision making(the ability to understand the moral dimensions ofdecisions and to accept responsibility for the conse-quences of actions taken); social interaction (theability to get things done in groups); global per-spectives (the ability to understand diverse opin-ions, ideas, and beliefs about global issues); ewectivecitizenship (the ability to engage collaboratively incommunity issues); and aesthetic responsiveness (theability to make meaning out of artistic experiencesand to explain choices of aesthetic expressions).The "ve professional education abilities include:conceptualization (the ability to integrate contentknowledge and understanding of education to planand implement instruction); diagnosis; coordination(the ability to manage resources e!ectively to ac-complish learning goals); verbal, nonverbal andmedia communication; and integrative interaction(the ability to act as a professional decisionmaker).

These abilities, as they are expressed accordingto six levels of increasingly sophisticated attain-ment, clearly state what program graduates areexpected to know, be like, and be able to do tocomplete the program successfully and be certi"edas teachers. In general, these levels begin with theability to identify particular skills or behaviors, andthey progress through the abilities to analyze,evaluate, and demonstrate those skills and behav-iors, and ultimately, to help others acquire and usethese skills in group settings and interpersonal rela-tionships. For example, a beginning teacher in thearea of conceptualization is expected to developsensitivity to individual learners; make links be-tween developmental theory and concrete indi-viduals; plan instruction that recognizes the impactof di!erences (in culture, gender, learning prefer-ences, etc.) on individuals and the group; and planmaterial to meet learners' current needs and to leadto the next level of development (Alverno College,1995).

Faculty believe that the best way to determinehow well candidates have developed the abilities isto assess behaviors that are associated with them.

They also believe that such assessments enhancelearning by providing feedback on learner strengthsand weaknesses and by supporting self-assessment.They developed an elaborate performance-basedassessment system that enables candidates andtheir teacher educators to know how well the can-didates can apply their knowledge and skills inrealistic contexts. From their very "rst day atAlverno when they make a videotape of themselvesgiving a short speech to their peers (a task whichwill be repeated and re-evaluated later), studentsare constantly assessed in relation to these abilities.Alverno premises its tight coupling of content,pedagogy, and assessment on the belief that learn-ing occurs best when learners have a good sense ofwhy they are learning something, awareness of thespeci"c standards that they must meet to accom-plish this learning, and a way of seeing what theyhave learned.

4.2. Integrating exhibitions with curriculum

When the college moved to the ability-basedcurriculum, faculty redesigned all coursework, "eldexperiences, and assessments to insure the system-atic development of the knowledge, skills, disposi-tions, and attitudes implied by the abilities. All ofthe course syllabi at Alverno spell out which devel-opmental levels of which abilities they address. Inaddition, syllabi describe the learning activities andassessments that are provided to help studentslearn the abilities and to judge how well they havelearned them. These include essays, letters, positionpapers, case study analyses, observations of events,talks to simulated audiences, productions of videosand curriculum materials, simulated events such asparent}teacher conferences, and the like.

Students also experience a series of required as-sessments enabling them to pass from one stage ofthe program to another. For example, in a "fthsemester external assessment integrating learningfrom several courses, "ve to six students are askedto take on the role of a teacher group called by thedistrict to review the district's mission statement.Candidates study background materials such as thedistrict's philosophy as well as readings on suchissues as curriculum, integration and multiculturaleducation. In preparation for the videotaped as-


sessment, students review the criteria for the abil-ities of social interaction and e!ective citizenship bywhich their performance will be assessed. Follow-ing the simulation and before receiving feedbackfrom faculty, they view the tape of the meeting andcomplete a self-assessment response form (Zeich-ner, 1999). Virtually every assignment and assess-ment begins with reference to the criteria for theperformance being developed and ends with anopportunity for candidates to evaluate their ownwork. The end result, as indicated by the judge-ments of cooperating teachers, college supervisors,employing principals, and candidate assessments oftheir preparation, is a set of graduates who are bothextraordinarily self-re#ective and practically well-prepared for sophisticated practice in the class-room (Darling-Hammond, 2000; Zeichner, 1999).As one principal who hires Alverno graduates ob-served:

They constantly re#ect on their instruction andthey're very open to suggestions or to changinga lesson. They're very able to assess the actuallesson they've taught and in a fairly critical man-ner. They have the skills to do that2. That's notto say that other students are not able to pick itup. It's just that Alverno students seem to comewith that knowledge. They've been forced topractice it on an ongoing basis so they havere"ned it (Zeichner, 1999).

In teacher education, as in elementary and sec-ondary education, there are several potential bene-"ts of continual public practice and assessmentthrough exhibitions of performance. As Ted Sizer(1992) observes of exhibitions in his work withreforming secondary schools, these demonstrationscan help make clear what students should be ableto do and focus e!ort accordingly, help faculty`map backwarda from their conception of desiredlearning to a curriculum that can develop suchlearning, and provide a basis for accountability tothe student and to the broader publics that a pro-gram serves.

As with other strategies, these bene"ts are notautomatic. They depend on choosing tasks thatrepresent important skills and abilities and on in-tegrating such assessments into a well-developedset of learning experiences. Exhibitions also require

a clear and focused set of goals that adequatelyre#ect the complexities of the tasks to be accomp-lished and consider their outcomes for teaching andlearning. To accomplish this, they demand as-sessors who are themselves expert in the areas ofwork being developed. Absent these character-istics, exhibitions can be merely performanceswithout standards, unfocussed activities that pro-vide little guidance or evaluation for developinghigh levels of skill. The fate of microteaching andcompetency-based teacher education as used bymany teacher education programs in the 1970scomes to mind as one illustration of this potentialproblem. Although well-developed in some institu-tions (Alverno's ability-based curriculum was, forexample, an outgrowth of the competency move-ment of that time), in others the techniques ofspecifying and observing performances became dis-connected from a well-grounded base of theory andfrom standards for performance. Consequently, theexhibitions of behavior often became little morethan that } performances in which behaviors wereobserved and sometimes tallied but not well-as-sessed in terms of their appropriateness for a par-ticular purpose or context or for their actual orlikely in#uences on students' learning. Assessmentsthat overcome these di$culties integrate exhibi-tions with a well-conceptualized set of standards,analysis of teachers' goals, contexts, and intentions,and a view of the big picture of teaching and learn-ing for both prospective teachers and their stu-dents.

5. Portfolios

The bene"ts of exhibitions can be further ex-panded when evidence of performance is assembledto allow a more comprehensive and holistic exam-ination of abilities. Portfolios are means by whichteachers select and re#ect upon artifacts of theirpractice collected over time and from multiplesources and diverse contexts to provide evidence oftheir thinking, learning, and performance. Port-folios can include documents that derive directlyfrom teaching } copies of lesson or unit plans,syllabi, handouts given to students, assignments,tests, and samples of student work (with or without


teacher feedback) } as well as photographs, video-tapes, or audiotapes or classroom activities rangingfrom bulletin boards and displays, to taped lessons,conferences with students, and the like (Darling-Hammond et al., 1998). They can also includedocuments that require additional analysis on thepart of the teacher, such as teacher logs or journals,detailed descriptions or analyses of lessons or stu-dent work, and re#ection on the outcomes of teach-ing activities. Portfolios can include documentsthat derive from the evaluations of others: notesby an observer of teaching, peer or administratorrecommendations, student evaluations, and so on(Bird & King, 1990; Athanases, 1994; Haertel,1991).

Teacher portfolios provide opportunities for ro-bust documentation of practice. As an assessmenttool, they can provide a comprehensive look at howthe various aspects of a teacher's practice } plan-ning, instruction, assessment, curriculum design, andcommunications with peers and parents } cometogether. As a tool for learning and re#ection, port-folios can alleviate what Lee Shulman has referredto as `pedagogical amnesiaa } a disease endemic toteaching at all levels. Pedagogical amnesia } char-acterized by the inability to record and recall thefruits of teaching experience } is actually a symp-tom of the multidimensional complexity of teach-ing. So much happens so fast that it is a blur.Portfolios, like cases, help make teaching stand stilllong enough to be examined, shared, and learnedfrom.

5.1. Approaches to portfolio assessment

In the portfolio assessments of the NationalBoard for Professional Teaching Standards, candi-dates include collections of the work of severaldi!erent students over many weeks of teaching,rather like mini-student portfolios. They show anddiscuss their teaching, evidence of student learning,the feedback they have given to student work, andstudents' responses to these teaching e!orts. Inshort, they exhibit and re#ect upon a set of recipro-cal teaching and learning interchanges in whichtheir own learning about their students is as funda-mental to the act of teaching as is their students'learning in response to speci"c lessons. Teacher

and student learning in#uence each other and arecompletely interwoven. Teachers consistentlytestify that the process of developing such a port-folio is a powerful occasion for their own learning(Athanases, 1994; Bradley, 1994; Haynes, 1995;Tracz, Sienty & Mata, 1994; Tracz et al., 1995).

Preservice teacher preparation programs areincreasingly using portfolios as means for aggregat-ing and integrating learning experiences, andassessing students' readiness to assume the respons-ibility of teaching. At Alverno College, performanceassessments drawn from exhibitions and othersources are assembled in a portfolio that providesthe basis for a portfolio interview assessment thatoccurs at the end of the preprofessional stage of theprogram and is used as a gateway to student teach-ing. Students create a portfolio by reviewing theirwork in all of their courses to date. They collectexamples of written work, lesson and unit plans,videotapes of their work with pupils, and instruc-tional materials they have created and make deci-sions about what represents their strengths. Theportfolio includes a written analysis of a videotapedlesson based on the "ve abilities. Student facultyadvisors as well as teams of school-based educatorsfrom area schools review the portfolios. The princi-pal and teacher assessors provide feedback to stu-dents about their areas of strength and areas ofneeded growth as demonstrated in the portfolioand make a recommendation to Alverno about thestudents' readiness for student teaching. Candi-dates, using the input of school and college-basedassessors, formulate speci"c goals for their studentteaching experience (Zeichner, 1999).

At the University of Southern Maine (USM),secondary teaching candidates develop a portfolioof their practice over the course of a year-longgraduate level program in which they are placed asinterns in school classrooms while simultaneouslycompleting coursework in teaching methods, learn-ing and development, curriculum, and assessment.The portfolio includes the evidence that candidateso!er as a basis for the judgement as to whether theyare ready to complete the program and becomecerti"ed to teach. A panel of university- andschool-based faculty makes the ultimate judgementabout certi"cation following a portfolio interviewin which the candidate presents and defends his or


her work. The portfolio construction process isdesigned to foster continuous self-reaction and in-ternalization of a set of standards for teaching(Whitford et al., 1999). The standards for whatbeginning teachers should know and be able to dowere developed by faculty drawing upon the modellicensing standards o!ered by the Interstate NewTeacher Assessment and Support Consortium(INTASC, 1992), and include statements of know-ledge, skills, and dispositions in the following areas:

f knowledge of child and adolescent developmentand principles of learning;

f knowledge of subject matter and how to make itaccessible to students while fostering indepen-dent inquiry;

f instructional planning based on knowledge ofthe learner, the subject matter, the community,the intended student outcomes, and the curricu-lum;

f uses of instructional strategies and technology topromote learning and independent inquiry;

f assessment for communicating feedback andpromoting self-evaluation;

f respect for diversity and the ability to createinstructional opportunities for diverse learners;

f well-articulated beliefs about teaching, learning,and education linked to demonstrable practicesin support of those beliefs;

f the ability to plan instruction that promotes thevalues and practices of citizenship;

f the ability to work collaboratively to improvethe conditions of learning for students andadults;

f commitment to re#ection and continuous profes-sional development; and

f classroom management that supports individualresponsibility and democratic community.

Candidates assemble a body of evidence to dem-onstrate their learning and competence across theseareas and may include artifacts like their own state-ments of teaching philosophy, classroom lessons,student work, and so on. The process of portfolioconstruction also includes critical conversations re-garding the candidate's practice with mentors orpeers who are part of a portfolio team and re#ec-tions on the contents of the portfolio that describe

what each entry represents and why it is included,what the teacher learned from the experience aboutteaching and learning, and why that is important} that is, the personal meaning of the learning. Theprocess concludes with a portfolio presentation tofaculty and peers that is a major aspect of the "nalgraduation and certi"cation decision (Lyons, 1998,p. 19).

5.2. Outcomes of a portfolio process

This process of construction and re#ection uponthe portfolio is as important for candidate learningas are the components of the portfolio itself. It isthrough this process of selecting and discussingartifacts of their practice that candidates internalizethe standards, examine more deeply what they aredoing and what it means, and gain multiple per-spectives on the meaning of events, thus enhancingtheir ability to learn from those events (Whitfordet al., 1999). This notion is implicit in Lee Shul-man's (1994) de"nition of a teaching portfolio as`the structured documentary history of a (carefullyselected) set of coached or mentored accomplish-ments substantiated by samples of student workand fully realized only through re#ective writing,deliberation, and serious conversationa. The waysin which these processes contribute to the value ofcandidates' learning are illustrated by these com-ments from two of USM's teacher interns:

The portfolio process worked best when it helpedme to re#ect on what I can improve on and whatI did well. I have found that when I am in theprocess of something I become convinced thatI will remember it } including all the details. ButI don't2. I have found that when I re#ect andcreate my portfolio, I reinforce the event in mymemory so that I am less likely to forget about it.The process of re#ection imprints the event ina unique way2. What this points to is the needto create portfolios contemporaneously with the[teaching] process. (Davis & Honan, 1998, p. 96).

Designing my portfolio helped me to clarify andarticulate visually and in writing my teachingphilosophy. It is the actual process that I value:collecting artifacts, organizing, re#ecting, and re-ceiving feedback at the portfolio evaluation2.


By receiving positive feedback and constructivecriticism, I concluded that my portfolio is a con-tinuum of my learning as a teacher, i.e., it willnever be done. Instead of my portfolio presenta-tion being a "nal, pass/fail assessment, it wasa learning experience in and of itself. (Davis& Honan, 1998, p. 98)

The bene"ts for teacher learning of well-con-structed portfolios seem related to their ability to:

f Raise teaching decisions to consciousness andthus make them available for deeper considera-tion from many perspectives. The process oflooking at and thinking about decisions changesconsciousness about teaching, and thus changespractice. Beginning teacher candidates whoundergo such forms of assessment have to an-swer the question, `What am I aiming for asI learn to teach?a

f Take a long view of learning and of the develop-ment of performance. Because pro"cient perfor-mance must be developed over a long period oftime with continuous practice and re#ection onpractice, a cumulative record helps both to scaf-fold and evaluate that process.

f Support the developmental process by providingbenchmarks for good work, vehicles for self-as-sessment and peer assessment, and opportunitiesfor revision and re"nement.

f Connect thinking and performance. This helps todevelop the capacity for re#ection and action,rather than just one or the other. They bridge thetraditional theory}practice divide by asking forevidence of performance along with a discussionof why decisions and actions were taken.

f Provide multiple lenses and multiple sources ofevidence on thinking and performance, thus de-veloping many facets of performance and allow-ing many pathways into learning

f Make teaching and learning more public, there-by making the development of shared norms andstandards possible, as well as making the sharingof knowledge and experience more available.

These factors combine to enhance the candi-dates' abilities to integrate the knowledge, skills,and dispositions required of teaching and to pro-vide tools for continuous development once teach-

ing. As veteran teacher Shirley Bzdewka observedafter completing the NBPTS portfolio process:

I am a very di!erent teacher now. I know I wasa good teacher. But I also know that everyteacher always has a responsibility to be bettertomorrow than they were today, and I ama much more deliberate teacher now. I am muchmore focused. I can never, ever, do anythingagain with my kids and not ask myself, &Why?Why am I doing this? What are the e!ects on mykids? What are the bene"ts to my kids?' It is notthat I didn't care about those things before, but itis on such a conscious level now. (NCTAF, 1996).

As assessment tools, portfolios that are struc-tured around standards of practice are able toexamine a teacher's practice both in context and inthe light of a common set of expectations andbenchmarks. By giving assessors access to teachers'thinking as well as to evidence of their behaviorsand actions (e.g. through videotapes, lesson plans,assignments, and the like), portfolios permit theexamination of teacher deliberation, along with theoutcomes of that deliberation in teacher's actionsand student learning. The long-range view that isencouraged and supported by portfolios helpsassessors overcome some of the `limits of lookinga(Stodolsky, 1984) that have plagued traditional ob-servations of teaching. Assessors can examinea chain of events and thinking, analyze the qualityof deliberation and the grounding of decisions,evaluate the quality and appropriateness of actionstaken, and take into account the evidence of stu-dent characteristics and learning that are a basis forgauging e!ectiveness. In short, assessors using port-folios can `seea teaching in progress and make ithold still long enough to understand its intentionsand e!ects.

As with other strategies, these bene"ts are notinevitable. Portfolios, like cases, are a step awayfrom teaching itself, and can privilege a candidate'sability to select and write about artifacts of teach-ing more than the candidate's capacity actually toteach well in the classroom in the heat of realsituations with real students. It is undoubtedlyimportant that assessors of portfolios both beexpert in the "eld and savvy enough to sort outevidence of solid teaching from the public relations


3This discussion draws upon Snyder, Lippincott & Bower(1998).

trappings that could characterize such collections.Furthermore, it portfolios are not organizedaround a conception of teaching knowledge andskill and assessed in ways that represent that con-ception well, they can be mere collections of assign-ments bound together in a folder. Portfolios arelikely to be more useful for developing teachers'insights and judgments if they encourage re#ectionand revision of work against well-grounded stan-dards of practice in the "eld. If this kind of assess-ment is to shape novices' thinking about teaching,candidates and assessors must know what they areaiming for, what criteria for `good teachingawill beapplied in the review of work, and how each ele-ment of the portfolio contributes toward the overallpicture of teaching.

6. Problem-based inquiries

Yet another way to promote deeper understand-ing of teaching in context is to embed systematicresearch about the contexts and outcomes of teach-ing and schooling into candidates' programs ofstudy. In action research or inquiry projects,teachers design and conduct investigations intoconcerns arising from their work with children andfamilies. These inquiries may involve questions sim-ilar to those that teachers may explore with cases,but the method extends beyond personal re#ectionabout an individual's experiences and observationsto broader and more structured investigation in-volving the collection and aggregation of data andinformation about a problem. Teacher research ad-vocate Marilyn Cochran-Smith (1991) suggests thatthe posing and pursuit of questions provide impor-tant vehicles for teachers to understand both thecomplexities of teaching and the e!ects of di!erentsolutions or resolutions of endemic problems. `Theability to pose questionsa, she argues, `to strugglewith uncertainty and build evidence for reason-ing2 is an indispensable resource in the educationof teachersa (pp. 280}281).

Teacher research } like cases, exhibitions, andportfolios } can transform teaching from a privateand hidden act into community property (Shulman,1996). The sharing and critique of practice, alongwith research related to practice, create the corner-

stones of professions. When teaching is treated ascommunity property, problems, conjectures, ana-lyses, and interpretations can be examined by col-laborating professionals. These inquiries can bepreserved for future study and can be drawn uponand built upon by others. Such knowledge con-struction is not solely the domain of the outside`experta. Beginning teachers come with their ownperspectives and interests. Having prospectiveteachers engage from the start of their careers inaction research or classroom inquiry can help pre-pare them both as consumers of research and pro-ducers of knowledge. It can also give them tools tomake sense of their practice and help them thinkanalytically about the problems they confront. Asa tool for assessment, such research and inquiry canprovide insights into a teacher's analytic ability andher ability to frame a problem in a manner thatallows it to be thoughtfully examined (Lippincott,1999). Such studies can reveal a teacher's disposi-tion and skills for responding to problems of prac-tice with action-oriented hypotheses that may leadto improvement, rather than merely copying.

At the University of California at Santa Barbara,student teachers develop an action research projectas the culminating assessment for the Masters pro-gram of study. Called the `M.Ed. portfolioa, theinquiry is reported through a collection of studiesand re#ections about an issue of practice developedover the course of at least eleven months.3 Early intheir professional preparation year (August), stu-dents take an ethnography course to help themlearn to collect data in natural settings. ByDecember, most students have identi"ed an incho-ate passion about some element of teaching andlearning. Through a series of workshops and "eld-based experiences, students re"ne and focus theirquestions, moving between questioning and re#ec-tion upon the concrete artifacts they have beencollecting in their "eld experiences and in theircoursework. The data they collect may include arti-cles from the research literature and other readingson the topic, analyses they have conducted throughresearch papers and through data collected in their


4Some students postpone completion of the M.Ed. portfolio,electing to give themselves another year in the belief that addi-tional experience and re#ection will enrich their portfolio, theirteaching, and the learning of their students. The program holdsa series of Saturday workshops through the subsequent year tosupport the growth of these students. Despite the logisticalproblems and the unpaid time and labor demands of this model,it remains the preferred choice of the program faculty who workwith these "rst-year teachers.

school or classroom, re#ections on observed eventsthat bear on the topic, and examples of their ownteaching e!orts and outcomes that bear upon thetopic.

By March students form self-selected supportgroups and are assigned a facilitator. These supportgroups meet regularly so that members can informone another of their thinking/practice regardingtheir issue along with the evidence they have se-lected to document the outcomes of their inquiryand their learning and growth over time. Theseconversations, like those that accompany the con-struction of other kinds of portfolios, provide mul-tiple perspectives on the topic, raise new questions,and provoke deeper thinking. In the summer fol-lowing their year-long full-time student teachingexperience, students complete the M.Ed. Portfolio.4Recent examples of inquiry topics include:

f What is inclusion? In what ways has my teach-ing/the system created inclusion/exclusion?

f How can I make my US History curriculummeaningful to my second-language learners?

f What are the roles of modeling in creating clear,explicit teaching while simultaneously allowingfor creative and original student work?

f In what ways do I/can I assess transition ESLstudents?

f What do students really learn from doing home-work?

Successful completion of the project involves twocheckpoints. First, the group facilitator and everymember of the support group must give his or herapproval to the document. Once approved by thegroup, students schedule a public conversationwhere they receive feedback on their work from"ve critical friends. These include a school-based

educator who knows the candidate well (i.e.,a cooperating teacher), a school-based educatorwho does not know the candidate well (i.e., a princi-pal, another teacher), a university-based educatorwho knows the candidate well (i.e., the supervisor),a university-based educator who does not know thecandidate well (i.e., a content expert or researcher),and someone whose primary intersection with theschool is as a parent or in a community/socialservice capacity.

Several of these public conversations occur si-multaneously in a large room, somewhat likea poster session at the American Educational Re-search Association. Critical friends arrive prior tothe session and review the entire document withoutthe candidate present. The conference then is nota two-hour presentation of the work, but rathera two-hour conversation about teaching and learn-ing among professional educators about a topic ofmutual concern. Projects are assessed on their co-herence and clarity of ideas; signi"cance of the topicfor the "eld; evidence of growth over time in theway the candidate frames and understands the re-search questions, changes techniques and/or atti-tudes, and learns from problems and successes; andimplications for future development in teachingand learning.

Like a dissertation, one goal of the inquiry andits assessment is to develop and evaluate skills ofinvestigation and analysis. In addition, the projectis structured to encourage direct applications topractice. Finally, the process of evaluation is organ-ized to ensure multiple perspectives on the ques-tion, including those of parents or communitymembers, and feedback from various sources. Thegoal is the development of a thoughtful practitionerwho has tools to inquire into and address problemsof practice throughout his or her career. This goalmay or may not be achieved by the inquiry strat-egy, depending on how well the guidance o!eredenables students to learn to generate useful ques-tions and approaches to study and how to examineand make sense of the results. If this guidance isadequate, the habit of looking at the outcomes ofteaching strategies as a researcher could shapea long-term view of practice.

At UC-Santa Barbara, the emphasis on assess-ment of one's own learning as well as that of


students appears to shape teachers' later work. Ina school of education follow-up study of graduates,"rst-year teachers reported that they were usingassessment tools with children that their teachereducators used (Snyder et al., 1998). The portfolioappeared to help teachers connect their self-assess-ment with their assessment practices with students.In addition, UCSB program graduates rated them-selves better prepared to assess student learningand to use their knowledge of student learning toshape instruction than did a random nationalsample of beginning teachers (Snyder, 1997).

7. Side-e4ects of authentic assessment practices

The use of authentic assessment practices inteacher education appears to hold potential, atleast under some circumstances, for in#uencing thelearning of teachers and thereby the learningopportunities of their students. In addition, the useof such practices appears to support ongoing pro-gram improvement. Each of the sites describedabove has conducted studies of the e!ects of theirwork which found evidence that the informationprovided by these assessments provoked program-matic changes. A study of the University of Califor-nia } Santa Barbara program found, for instance,that `portfolios made our program more visible tous as well as illuminated the developmental natureof teachinga (Snyder et al., 1998, p. 138). Facultyfound that the portfolio processes undertaken inthis program had the unintended consequence ofhelping cooperating teachers and others involvedin the assessment of student teachers become morethoughtful about their own practice as well as theirmentoring of novices. School-based educatorsgained a greater understanding of the program andof the state's standards for teaching, which createdmore coherence between school- and university-based work; they also began to construct their ownportfolios as a means of enriching their ownpractice.

Authentic assessment can inform ongoing in-struction as well, by revealing what students under-stand well enough to apply. For instance, when oneof the authors taught a course on AdolescentDevelopment, her students' e!orts to develop

a case study of an adolescent illuminated the factthat few understood how to examine a student'sthinking or how to evaluate cognitive development.They had really never learned how to look forevidence of reasoning and understanding. As a re-sult, she began to treat the issues of cognitive devel-opment more extensively and concretely, usingvideotaped and written cases of student learningand student work samples to illustrate how cogni-tive development could be examined and assessed.Having more than super"cial evidence about thethinking and reasoning of one's own students canallow a teacher educator to better adapt instructionand to rede"ne program content.

Although anecdotes suggest the promise of thesetools for improving practice, the "eld lacks system-atic research evidence linking pre-service teacherlearning opportunities with inservice teacher class-room practices, and teachers' classroom practiceswith student learning outcomes. As Kleinfeld (1998)notes, `Virtually no formal evaluations of case-based teaching have been done to ask if teachersprepared through the case method actually teachbettera (p. 145). The same could be said of any ofthe assessment practices described above. The di$-culty in conducting such research may be partlyattributed to the multitude of variables that wouldneed to be considered and to the di$culty of draw-ing inferences about cause and e!ect given themany factors that in#uence teacher and studentlearning. Still, recent work that has establishedlinks between speci"c kinds of teacher learning withteaching practices and student learning (Cohen& Hill, 1997) suggests that such research may besuccessfully pursued.

The use of these curriculum and assessment prac-tices in teacher education programs also poseschallenges that educators and policy makers needto take into account if such practices are to meettheir potential for supporting the learning ofteachers and their students. As an add-on, auth-entic assessment of teaching is too expensive interms of time and money to be feasible. Unless suchassessment is embedded within a program of studyand treated as part of the curriculum and teachingprocess, it is not likely to be sustained. Embeddingauthentic assessment of teaching in preserviceteacher education requires the time and expertise of


school-based educators, college-based educators,and prospective educators working closely togetherto develop and discuss practice over time. Thesethree sets of resources need to be concentrated intime and space, rather than fragmented as is oftenthe case. Such practices may be more feasible whenthere are groups of prospective educators workingwith a team of cooperating teachers at a school site,as in a professional development school model, andclusters of teacher education faculty working to-gether with one another and school-based faculty(Snyder, 1998).

Such concentration of e!ort only works, how-ever, when supportive structures and processes arein place. One of the most important structures istime to develop and sustain the conversations andrelationships necessary for the sustained learningactivities embodied in authentic assessments. Thisin turn requires both rethinking of how existingresources are organized and used and how schoolsand colleges fund and organize responsibility forthe education of teachers. Among the policies thatare implicated in these matters are funding streamsfrom state governments that typically discouragecollaboration between schools and colleges, univer-sity hiring policies that often provide too few fac-ulty for the work of teacher education, tenure andpromotion policies that fail to reward work withschools, and fragmented curriculum that empha-sizes super"cial coverage over the development ofpro"ciency and understanding. Unless policies thatencourage collaboration and coherence are inplace, it is unlikely that programs can enact newassessments of teaching without a signi"cant in#uxof funds and greater time demands on sta! (Snyder,1998).

Even with these institutional conditions in place,however, teacher educators face a dilemma compa-rable to the one faced by K-12 teachers who useauthentic assessments: What should they do if thereare mismatches between assessments mandated bystates and embedded authentic assessment practi-ces? Most states, for example, still use multiplechoice tests of subject matter and teaching know-ledge as the basis for granting a beginning teacherlicense. (Connecticut's portfolio assessments for be-ginning teachers are an exception to the norm.)These tests increasingly determine candidates' op-

portunities to teach and the fate of teacher educa-tion programs seeking professional accreditation orstate approval. Should teacher education programscontinue to try to develop and use authentic, con-textualized assessments of teaching? Or will theysacri"ce their candidates' ability to receive a cre-dential if they do not turn their programs intocourses of test preparation? How well will candi-dates from `authentica programs perform on theexam(s) as compared to those who attend `testprepa programs? How e!ective are di!erently pre-pared teachers in the classroom? Until teacher edu-cators subject their work to rigorous inquiry thatcan begin to answer these questions, policy andpractice are likely to remain at odds.

Among the questions that are important for fu-ture research are, at least, the following:

f How well do di!erent types of assessmentsmeasure the capacity to teach? What evidencecan be developed of the predictive and con-sequential validity of various measures?

f What are the e!ects on teacher learning of theuse of di!erent types of assessment?

f Given that no single measure of teaching is ad-equate to the task of representing such a complexactivity, what mix of assessment methods, instru-ments, and sources of evidence seems to providethe greatest leverage on teacher development, onthe one hand, and valid assessment, on the other?

Continued work on these questions may enableteachers and teacher educators to develop strat-egies that are both powerful and practical for thedevelopment and evaluation of contextualizedteaching.

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