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Rethinking Accountability: Response to "The ePortfolio Hijacked"

1/23/2008

By Joe Shedd

Portfolios were to be one of the principal means by which they would demonstrate progress toward mastery of that proficiency. Our portfolio system had to allow candidates to select and structure evidence of their professional development according to values and themes of their own choosing, reflecting on whatever aspects of their development they considered important. Otherwise, they could not serve as evidence of their authors' ability to critically reflect on their own and their K12 students' learning and to explain their understandings to various audiences. Nor could the process of developing portfolios serve as a means of cultivating those skills.

Yes, we require each of our students' portfolios to address our five basic proficiencies, to provide and evaluate evidence of their K12 students' learning, to articulate their own  "emerging theory" of teaching and learning, and to reflect on how that theory and their own skills have evolved over time. We believe that all of those requirements are consistent with the critical reflection and ability to account for one's practice that society expects of any aspiring professional. But within that basic framework, we respect our students' right to articulate theories, values, and themes, select and organize evidence, and provide and structure reflections as they see fit. Our own principles require us to do so.

We were able to free our portfolios from the sterile logic of traditional management assessment systems, but still provide a place for them within our overall assessment system. Using “goal-aware” tools our own Living SchoolBook software team has developed to use with our Sakai-based portfolio and course management systems, our School of Education has made considerable progress in creating a digital system that can accommodate both sets of needs. We realized that we did not have to consider or evaluate our students' portfolios as comprehensive evidence of all the most important things they have learned in their preparation programs. (That is the function of the entire assessment system, not any one of its parts.) Rather, we chose to treat portfolios as evidence of our students' ability to critically reflect on and articulate understandings of what they have learned; we now evaluate them on that basis. Portfolios provide each student with an opportunity to account, in an active, creative, and principled way, for his or her own learning and his or her own impact on children in K12 classrooms.

In one sense, of course, the result is exactly what Batson calls for: electronic portfolios over which students retain primary ownership, and more comprehensive collections of evidence of student learning selected and organized for institutional purposes. The difference is in how we think of the relationship between the two, and more broadly, the relationship between learning and accountability. Rather than building firewalls, we should be looking for ways of dismantling the barriers that have denied our students (and by extension, practicing educators and professionals in many other fields) an active voice in the systems that purport to account for their learning and performance. ePortfolios, designed and owned by their authors, are potentially powerful tools for serving that end.


[Author's note: For information about Syracuse University School of Education's ePortfolio and related learning management systems, visit http://lsb.syr.edu. For a provocative discussion of the relationship between learning and accountability, which helped us refine some of the ideas presented here, see Lee S. Shulman, "Counting and Recounting: Assessment and the Quest for Accountability" in the January/February 2007 issue of Change: http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/change/sub.asp?key=98&subkey=2169.]

Joe Shedd is an associate professor in the School of Education at Syracuse University. He is the past chair of Teaching and Leadership Programs in the School of Education.

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