Responding to Journals and Portfolio Artifacts

Journals and portfolios are mainstays of purposeful reflective activity. Yet some of your experiences with journals or portfolios may have been less than satisfying. Portfolio and journal analysis and reflection on the teaching/learning process can occur in a number of ways. It can be structured by the mentor or school system or left unstructured. The portfolio or journal could be shared with the mentor or kept private so the account is uncensored. If it is shared, it can be highly interactive or more one-way in communication. Further, beginning teacher portfolios and journals can record and examine an array of experiences at a variety of levels of complexity. Teachers might reflect on instructional planning, classroom management concerns, student diversity, teaching decisions during teacher/student interaction, parent conferences, individual student needs, teacher colleagues, or broader implications of school and district-wide curricular and/or policy choices on the welfare of teachers, students, and families. The challenge for mentors and university-based teacher educators who are interested in teacher development is how to guide the reflective process.

For the past seven years, we have been investigating a dialogue-based performance-based portfolio and journal analysis/reflection model that is developmental in orientation. Working with interns, new teachers, peer teachers, and clinical teachers, a series of field-based studies (Mann, 1992; Oja & Sprinthall, 1978; Thies-Sprinthall, 1984; Reiman & Thies-Sprinthall, 1993; Reiman & Parramore, 1993) have refined a framework for guiding the reflection of an intern. By using cognitive-developmental theory as an operational framework, teacher educators and mentors can gain an understanding of the patterns in performance-based portfolio and journal responses, the differences in persons' abilities to reflect upon and make meaning from their educational experiences, and how the written responses and/or feedback of the teacher educator must be differentiated to take these differences into account.

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