Abstract

A teacher portfolio for the acknowledgment of the teacher profession

Olga Bombardelli, University of Trento, Italy

My paper will address one of the central goals of the TEPE Network: 'Enhance quality through the renewal of evaluation cultures in teacher education' and deals with one of the questions about the state of the art of the discipline: ‘the kind of research to be prioritised to meet the needs of teacher education ..’.The paper presents innovative ideas because  it  describes a new approach to the teacher portfolio and offers a piece of new knowledge on the growing body of knowledge about how to build and use teaching portfolios, reporting an experience with teacher students at the University of Trento.The policy recommendations are linked to the own country (Italy) in order to improve and disseminate the development of portfolios for Italian teachers, for student teachers and for the mentores.Shulman (1998) defines the teacher’s portfolio as a “structured documentary history of a set of coached or mentored acts of teaching, substantiated by samples of student portfolios, and fully realized only through reflective writing, deliberation, and conversation” (Shulman,1998. p. 37).  We try to use the portfolio for enhancing the dignity of the teacher’s job as well, experimenting an additional approach to portfolios designed to enhance the status and social recognition of the this profession. I start from the premise that a better appreciaton of teaching by the society would give more authority to the teachers and at the same time more effectiveness to the education. Anyway the first actors for improving the status of teachers have to be the teachers themselves,  under taking (and reporting) actions for establishing a new understanding of the teaching job, with high initial qualification, continuing professional development, good teaching and guiding pupils, leadership capacity, networking and cooperating in Teachers professional organisations and being aware of the importance of their activity.