Portfolios: A strategy for developing learning and teaching in preservice education

Teaching portfolios have been used in the preservice teacher education program at Monash University to help student teachers to reflect on their learning about learning and teaching and to help them to convey this to others. The portfolio is an open-ended and un-graded task designed to explore teaching from many different vantage points. It is organised as a dynamic assessment task, not simply a static end product. This is done by considering teaching portfolios as comprising two important aspects, one is the process the other is the product. The process involves learning from the variety of experiences offered in the preservice education program and encouraging student teachers to reflect on these. The product is the development of the individual portfolio items that are used to demonstrate this learning to others. The portfolio comprises a number of individual items which act as a prompt to ''tap'' the creator's understanding of what it means to be a (science) teacher. This paper reports on the effectiveness and value of portfolios from the student-teachers' perspective by exploring how their understanding of the task evolved as they completed their preservice teacher education program.