The role of portfolios in teachers' professional growth and development: A knowledge building analysis

This study contributes to understanding the role of portfolios in promoting the growth of individual inservice teachers' professional knowledge. It involves six teachers of various backgrounds and experience who have used portfolios for at least a year. This study theorizes teachers' growth and development of professional knowledge within a framework of Popper's model (1979) of the growth of scientific knowledge, and Wolf and Dietz's (1998) model of teaching portfolios. I examine to what extent portfolio evidence supports the occurrence of growth and development of teachers' professional knowledge and the extent to which the use of portfolios contributes to that knowledge development. I question portfolio development as a useful form of professional growth and whether the reflective aspect of portfolio construction is fundamental to the professional growth and development of these six teachers. Reflective teaching and why reflection is essential to the portfolio process is addressed within the theoretical question of how to incorporate a view of reflection into the knowledge building framework. I provide an outline of strategies used to determine the role of teaching portfolios in promoting teacher professional knowledge and discuss methods employed in gathering and analyzing this information. For the majority of participants, the portfolio is useful because it helps them organize their thinking about their classroom work by providing a framework for piecing together the vast amount of information that bombards teachers. The portfolio as a framework allows information, perspectives, and changing practice to be reviewed so participants can examine their progress towards meeting particular goals. An overview of literature on teachers' professional knowledge suggests that teachers' professional knowledge is a fluid concept. Teachers' portfolios provide teachers with opportunities to explore and extend their tentative theories through discussions and feedback from colleagues and students, as well as to reflect on their own learning.;Portfolio usage should be presented as an option for teachers to choose among other alternative modes of inservice education.