ACER Portfolio framework

A portfolio task is a set of guidelines for teachers preparing an entry for their professional portfolio. A portfolio is simply a 'box' containing the entries. This year the ACER Portfolio Project Team has focused on developing four portfolio tasks for each of two fields of teaching: generalist primary teaching and secondary science teaching.

As in any assessment development process, it is important to develop a conceptual framework for designing the set of portfolio tasks. The purpose of the framework is to ensure representative samples of evidence about a teacher’s practice in relation to the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. The number of tasks is determined by the need to ensure that sufficient independent evidence is gathered to provide a reliable basis for assessing a teacher’s performance in relation to the standards. Each entry is designed to provide evidence related to several standards, reflecting the fact that teaching always represents an integration of the knowledge and skills described in the standards.

Key considerations in developing portfolio tasks:

• Together, the entries in a teacher’s portfolio need to provide a sufficient sample of evidence covering all of the standards (that is, if it is in the standards, it must be assessed).
• Together, the entries need to provide independent samples of evidence covering the curriculum that a teacher is responsible for teaching (that is, a primary teacher’s entries should cover several  subject areas, not just one; a secondary science teacher‘s entries should be from different classes).
• Together, the entries need to provide evidence covering a number of different and essential core teaching skills reflective of accomplished teaching (that is, the focus of each entry should be on a different pedagogical skill).  

We are currently working on the basis that a teacher’s portfolio will contain four entries. Other forms of evidence may be needed at a later stage to ensure all the standards are covered adequately.

Standards are not fully developed until it has been made clear how they will be used to judge performance. Fully developed standards are benchmarks illustrating what counts as meeting the standards.

There are three steps in developing standards for purposes such as professional certification. These are:

1. Defining the standards:(that is, what is to be assessed. This is the purpose of the Australian Professional Standards for Teaching.)

2. Developing valid methods for gathering evidence about teaching: (that is, how performance against the standards will be assessed).

3. Setting performance standards: (that is, how the evidence will be evaluated and how we will decide what counts as meeting the standard and define benchmarks).

Standards must not only describe what good teachers know and do (that is, what will be assessed), but also describe how evidence about capability and performance will be gathered, and how judgements will be made about whether the evidence shows that the standards have been met.

The purpose of the ACER Portfolio Project is to provide a basis for completing Steps 2 and 3. In effect, the Portfolio Project will be aiming to provide fully developed examples of what counts as meeting the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers at the Highly Accomplished level. This will involve developing rubrics defining levels of performance and identifying examples of portfolio entries that exemplify those performance levels. In other words, the Portfolio Project aims to set performance standards and illustrate the current content of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers in terms of performance benchmarks in particular fields of teaching.

Highly accomplished teaching is complex professional work and methods for assessing teaching need to reflect that complexity. A central requirement for these methods is that they provide evidence of what students are doing and learning as a direct result of a teacher’s methods of teaching (unlike value-added measures based on standardised tests).

Key characteristics of such methods are that:

1. They  measure and reflect the intentions of the standards accurately;
2. They represent authentic and significant 'chunks' of a teacher’s work – such as a unit of work over several weeks, not just a single lesson;
3. They provide a basis by which teachers can show how their students have developed in their learning over time as a direct result of their teaching;
4. They are fair and do not prescribe or favour any particular style of teaching;
5. They are 'context free', that is, they measure something that all teachers should be able to do no matter where they teach; and
6. They are interpreted in the same way by different teachers.

Another feature of well-designed assessment methods such as portfolio tasks is that, when teachers undertake them, they necessarily become engaged in highly effective modes of professional learning. These include detailed analysis, evaluation and reflection on their teaching in relation to standards for highly accomplished teaching.