David Baume

We want to use Portfolios to judge whether teachers should receive both an academic qualification and a professional qualification or accreditation.

David Baume, Open University

We're exploring how to use Portfolios to assess the competences of the university teachers who take the courses in teaching which we are planning here in the new Centre for Higher Education Practice at the UK Open University. We want to use Portfolios to judge whether teachers should receive both an academic qualification and a professional qualification or accreditation. (This issue has been wrestled with by many leaders of courses for new university teachers.)

The exploration which we are undertaking requires us to explore the purposes of the Portfolio, the means whereby it will be assessed, and the implications of these for the structure and preparation of the Portfolio. What follows is a personal account, informed by conversations with my colleagues Graham Gibbs and Carole Baume.

The purpose, in our case, is to assess both professional competence and academic attainment. We have a clear account of professional competence, that of the Teacher Accreditation Scheme of the Staff and Educational Development Association. Given this clear account, two approaches to assessment immediately suggest themselves: One, the course participant presents evidence, and the assessors make a judgement of it against the learning outcomes and the underlying principles and values. Two, the course participant assessed themselves against the learning outcomes and the underlying principles and values, and the assessor moderates, checks, that self-assessment. This latter approach appeals to us. The preparation of a criterion-referenced critical commentary on one's own work is a valuable and demanding activity. Such self-assessment brings to life the idea of the course participant as a reflective practitioner, here reflecting on their own practice.

Such self assessment of course requires a further element in the Portfolio, the self-assessment. Or perhaps this is not a new element of the Portfolio, but simply a more precise specification of the reflective commentary, the pulling-together document which it is suggested should accompany or front a Portfolio. Or perhaps the self-assessment should remain firmly outside the covers of the Portfolio, not part of it but about it. When we publish the academic, as well as the professional, criteria against which the Portfolios will be assessed, a similar process of moderated self assessment may be appropriate. (Questions about the relationship between the weight given to, and negotiation between, the self-assessment judgements and the moderations remain to be answered, as do many others.)

Let's go a step further. To mention "Portfolio Assessment" for courses in a large distance-learning University is to invoke visions of convoys of lorries, mountains of boxes and mass suicides in the post-room. Portfolios can be huge. One of the first I saw filled a shopping trolley. It might as well have been a filing cabinet on wheels. It was difficult to assess. One approach is simply to limit the phsyical size of the portfolio. The SEDA Fellowships Scheme, a professional qualification for staff and educational developers, requires, as well as more esoteric criteria, that the Portfolio presented for assessment must fit into a (rather smart) plastic carrying case that houses two A4 ring binders, and maybe a video tape. Writing short is harder than writing long. Preparing a short Portfolio is, correspondingly harder than flinging every one one has ever produced into a shopping trolley.

We can consider going further. Why not require candidates to prepare a complete Portfolio, but have the tutors assess only the critical commentary plus some component of the Portfolio selected (by the assessors) from the contents page? A tutor could certify that the whole Portfolio exists. One might moderate such an assessment by sampling, at random, some appropriate proportion of the total. We shall explore these and other possibilities.

Other benefits of course flow from preparing Portfolios, even if they are to be used for assessment. Preparing a Portfolio should always involves acts of judgement, periods of critical reflection, of processing experience and learning from experience. It can be a moving experience - a long look into the mirror, with the image enhanced for greater clarity (sometimes welcome, sometimes not.) But if the sole or primary purpose of preparing the Portfolio is for assessment, then the Portfolio will take one form. If the purpose is to plan for one's future professional development, or to prepare and make a case for promotion, or to generate a growing journal of practice from which to learn, then different forms may be appropriate. I am just a little nervous of a Portfolio prepared without purpose, and of the neighbouring concept that one universal Portfolio can serve a great variety of purposes. This may be true of a dead collection of materials; it can surely never be true of a Portfolio whose selection and shape and form and critical and linking commentaries and explanantions were all prepared for a particular purpose.

Most books on writing stress the need to decide on purpose and audience before starting to write. I feel that the same is true about Portfolios. I shall long be haunted by that shopping trolley, laden with dead records of a seemingly unsorted, unprocessed career.