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It is obviously important to be deeply familiar with the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers and to choose units of work that will provide you with rich opportunities to show how you meet them. It is also important to choose tasks for your portfolio that are feasible and achievable within a timeframe of two weeks to one semester. Shorter time periods make it less likely that your unit of work has had sufficient time to show an impact.
Entry 4 is about how you engage colleagues in collaborative work. It might also be based on a unit of work that is planned and taught collaboratively, or on an initiative to meet the needs of an identified group of students, which calls for professional learning and improved practice.
A suitable initiative for portfolio Entry 4 might be quite modest in scope (in terms of the number of teachers and students involved), but still meet an important need. Its focus and boundaries clear. For example, it may focus on one small group of students with a particular need you have identified based on achievement data. It may involve one small group of staff for the duration, but still be rich in opportunities for you demonstrate how you have engaged colleagues in a productive collaborative initiative to the benefit of students. For this initiative, assessors will look for evidence of development over time in collaborative practices.
Videos can often provide clearer and more convincing evidence of teaching than written reports. However, they can only provide a very small sample of your teaching. They should be seen as authentic samples of what you can do, not necessarily what you typically do. As the assessors are not able to visit your school, your video segments are an important window into your leadership capabilities.
The purpose of the video segments for Entries 2 and 3 is to provide direct evidence of your teaching and the environment you have established for learning. For Entry 4, the purpose is to provide evidence of how you have engaged colleagues in a collaborative initiative to improve student outcomes. Even though the video segments will be short (no more than 15-20 minutes in total for an entry), they can still provide valid and valuable evidence relevant to the standards about how you:
Before you make any video recordings it will be necessary to obtain the consent of your students’ parents or carers, or other teachers involved. Please use this consent form to obtain permission to make video recordings from parents and carers, or teachers where appropriate.
In making video recordings, it is natural initially to be conscious of the camera and consequently video recordings and it will be difficult to capture authentic evidence of your teaching. The best way to ensure that you obtain authentic evidence of your teaching is to make several recordings, until you and your students forget the camera is there.
For whole-class activities, set the camera up on a tripod giving a wide angle view of the classroom or the groups involved. It is often best to film from the side. It is vital that speech is clearly audible and while modern cameras have good audio reception, you may need to use a separate microphone to ensure that student talk is clear. If you are filming small student groups and circulating among groups it may be best to carry a handheld microphone to record your voice and the voices of the students.
The heart of each portfolio entry is the Written Commentary. This is where you will be helping the assessor to 'see' how your evidence shows how you are meeting the relevant standards in your school context. The Guidelines to the Written Commentary provide questions to help you describe your practice and the reasoning behind it in the best light.
The Guidelines call for three different kinds of writing about your teaching: descriptive, analytical and reflective writing. To some extent, these different kinds of writing match the stages in your Written Commentary. It is important to be aware of each style of writing and to make sure each style is present in your entry.
You will be using descriptive writing mainly in the initial stages of your written commentary as you describe the unit of work featured in your entry: its aims and why they were important for your students; the learning plan and its rationale; the research you drew upon and how you used it; your plan for catering for different students and monitoring their learning; and what happened during the implementation stages. This will provide a coherent account of the unit of work, showing clear links between each of its stages.
You will be using analytical writing later to take the assessor inside your thought processes, your reasoning about each stage of the entry, your interpretation of what was happening during the unit of work and your evaluation of its impact. It is important to recognise the difference between descriptive and analytical writing. Your analysis will deal with reasons, motives, and interpretation and will be grounded in the concrete evidence you provide in the materials you submit.
This is perhaps the most important part of your portfolio entry. What matters here is the quality of the discussion you provide about the evidence in your student work samples, video segments and artefacts. You will be pointing constantly to evidence about what your students are doing, saying, writing, learning and so on, as a result of your teaching. You will also be identifying how it illustrates the way you are meeting the standards in your school context.
It is not necessary that your teaching of this unit of work was an unequivocal success (teaching rarely is). What matters more is the quality of your analysis in the light of the purposes for your unit of work. Professional development benefits flow from thinking analytically about practice and evaluation of one’s own work. Assessors will be looking for thoughtful and honest discussion about your teaching and factors affecting its implementation and impact on student outcomes.
In the final sections of your Written Commentary, you will move to a more reflective mode of writing as you share what you have learned about your teaching and its impact on students. Assessors will be looking for an insightful reflective discussion about your teaching. You will be reflecting on how you would handle a similar unit of work with students in the future. This is where you will be showing assessors how you will use what you have learned about your teaching to inform and improve your practice in the future.