UTeach Portfolio Concordance
The portfolio process was extremely helpful in making me organize broad principles and points of specific practice
that will guide me as a student teacher and for my whole teaching career.
I've prepared a set of documents and resources that matched how I personally approach the teaching process. My teaching
approach maps straightforwardly, but not directly, to the UTeach sample template. Much of this is because I've tried
to prepare a product that I may specialize in the future to address students, parents and administrators. Most
of all, it's because I've tried to prepare a document that will guide me as I develop curriculum, lessons, resources
and my presonal approach to teaching.
One of the most helpful outcomes was the realization -- while preparing my teaching philosophy -- that some of the
questions large and small I wrestled with were beyond those I should resolve in a draft portfolio. I've left many of
those questions in the document, and I look forward to working with the master teachers and my fellow UTeach students
to understand them.
Here, then, is an index showing how I would coordinate my teaching approach with the portfolio proficiencies:
Criterion 1: Designing Learner-Centered Instruction
- Engages students in a variety of interesting, challenging, and worthwhile activities.
- Helps students link new content with their prior knowledge and gain insights into their misconceptions.
- Develops clearly-stated objectives that are age-appropriate and able to be assessed.
- Guides students in using appropriate technology to gather, organize and display data.
- Selects or designs a variety of worthwhile assessment instruments, some of which involve student self-assessment.
Criterion 2: Establishing a Learner-Centered Classroom
- Models respect for student diversity and encourages all students to cooperate.
- Creates learning activities that emphasize collaboration and teamwork.
- Consistently and effectively enforces high expectations for student behavior.
- Responds flexibly to students during a lesson, adjusting instruction as needed depending on student progress.
- Employs safe practices in designing, planning and implementing all instructional activities.
Criterion 3: Using Learner-Centered Communication
- Asks carefully framed questions that foster the development of higher-order thinking skills and logical reasoning/problem
solving.
- Facilitates reflection and discussion between students about their inquiry experiences.
- Engages students in tasks that require them to communicate their reasoning using appropriate and precise terminology.
- Communicates the importance of their instructional content and their expectations for high quality work.
- Provides students with timely feedback that is accurate, constructive, substantive and specific.
Criterion 4: Practicing Learner-Centered Professionalism
- Engages in collaborative decision making and problem solving with other educators.
- Engages student families in their children's education and responds appropriately to their concerns.
- I engage in a variety of activities to continually enhance my content and pedagogical skills.
- Encourages feedback from students and colleagues and reflects on how he/she can improve his/her teaching performance.
- Interacts with students in a way that is consistent with the legal and ethical guidelines of the profession.
Criterion 5: Engaging in Learner-Centered Mathematics
- Applies both informal and formal mathematical reasoning in problem solving.
- Identifies appropriate technology to explore a mathematical problem and explains the limits this technology places
on the knowledge acquired.
- Generates a mathematical model to represent a real-world situation and evaluate how well the model represents the
situation.
- Understands and uses connections among the mathematical concepts, procedures and representations.
- Illustrates knowledge of the history and cultural context of mathematics; in particular, the evolution of mathematical
concepts.