Graham Gibbs (2)

When is a portfolio good enough?

Graham Gibbs, Open University

Much use of portfolios involves a threshold judgment

Much of the recent innovation associated with the use of portfolios has been focussed on the development of teaching and the fostering of reflective teachers. But the original use of portfolios involved a threshold judgment: whether a teacher is worthy of promotion or not. Where portfolios are secondary adjuncts to research cv's there is probably a very low threshold indeed - provided that you have made some effort and the evidence is not damning then you have not disqualified yourself from consideration of your research record. Once the teaching portfolio is used as almost the only evidence this threshold decision becomes a little harder. Recent work has also built the use of portfolios into accredited courses concerned exclusively with teaching where a pass/fail decision needs to be made. And some of these courses are in contexts where a fail decision has immediate and serious consequences for the career of the teacher involved. In these circumstances how a portfolio is judged to be good enough is extremely important.

Many portfolio-based schemes specify types of evidence or criteria.

One approach to this problem is to specify categories of evidence which must be included - but this does not take us very far as it specifies nothing about the required quality of the evidence. One stage further, adopted by SEDA in its assessment of portfolios prepared by educational development staff (SEDA Fellowship Scheme) is to specify values which must be evident in the portfolio. Typically when the portfolio is prepared there is a thorough cross referencing or indexing to these values and explanations as to how the evidence embodies the values. Other schemes specify criteria by which portfolios are assessed. Still others (e.g. in Holland) assess portfolios against learning contracts. The contract provides a clearer guide to whether the evidence includes what has been agreed, but not what the standards for this evidence should have been when the contract was drawn up.

Most portfolio-based schemes do not specify standards

In fact none of these schemes specify standards: a cut-off point below which a portfolio is considered to be not good enough. Now it can be argued, with some justification, that there are no explicit standards for assessing research adequacy or excellence, either. But for research a culture has developed, largely as a consequence of the involvement of almost all academics in peer review processes over an extended period of time, through which some sense of standards is shared. This is certainly not an infallible or fair sense of standards but it is probably somewhat more commonly understood and shared than any set of standards currently associated with assessing portfolios. Schemes such as the SEDA Teacher Accreditation Scheme in the UK now have such a large number of institutions involved that a sense of standards is evolving through shared experience, as it has done for research, though variations between institutional versions of the scheme are testing notions of standards at every turn.

There is a pressing need for explicit statements of standards against which portfolios should be assessed.

I would therefore argue that there is a pressing need for explicit statements of standards against which portfolios should be assessed. This requires nothing less than a definition of competence for teachers in higher education. A few years ago this would have been unthinkable, but in the UK now the main university teachers' Union, the AUT, is contemplating professionalising university teaching and specifying standards for accreditation without which you cannot practice as a teacher in a university, possibly with periodic re-accreditation, as in many other professions. The specification of such standards internationally would increase their credibility and also the difficulty of any interest group in arguing against them. With such specifications portfolios will become much easier to judge reliably and fairly.