How will you use the Masters in Education program standards to guide the development of your professional portfolio?

The program standards define the core learning goals of my master’s degree. As such, it will be essential to represent exercises, achievements and milestones from each of the four domains and most if not all of the sub-domains. As I mentioned in my answer to Wk3:DQ1, I have clear personal goals as regards my professional portfolio. I want it to reflect my life experience and my journey. While I am only beginning to learn about professional portfolios and TaskStream, it seems to me that the program standards could (and perhaps should) be the skeleton upon which the M.Ed. portion of the portfolio is hung. This is true for two reasons. One, in the reading I have done so far it seems as if the portfolio may be an essential element of the hiring process to become a teacher. To the extent that this is true, I would want to fully reflect my experience and achievement in this program. The program standards are the standards against which my achievement is gauged, the benchmark. They must be included. Second, since these standards are the skeleton of the program, it is artistically necessary to incorporate their shape and shadow in the portfolio to fully reflect my experience in the program.

Teachers today are held accountable for a wide variety of standards.  What other industries/professions adhere to standards?  Why?  Share your own experiences if you can.

When I worked as a trader and trading manager there was a complex web of rules and regulations that governed behavior. There was core licensing. For me, passing a Series 7 and Series 63 (for supervisors) was required by the SEC. The companies I worked for reported a variety of things regularly, some daily. All of these needed to be monitored and kept in compliance. There were clear rules about interactions with customers and other counterparties; what was allowed, what was not. There were also rating agency standards of things like transactions volume and balance sheet usage.

Looking back on it, I have many thoughts, particularly as I contrast that experience to that of a teacher. One is that it is frequently somebody else’s job to monitor, track and document adherence to standards. It is not the day to day experience of a trader to be working to standards in the foreground. However, standards are a major presence in the background, informing everything that is done. For teachers, it would seem that there are specific curriculum standards which frame in a very powerful way certain foreground and background aspects of each day.

Both kinds of standards (background/foreground) pose challenges for me. I have a strong tendency to be goal directed to an extreme and to be inpatient of obstacles to that goal. This is particularly true if I have been given a task and a method to accomplish that task but I feel the method is sub-optimal.

I already see myself in conflict with the first grade math curriculum. The folks who wrote Amelia’s math curriculum have a curious inclination towards breaking the children’s confidence with what they have learned while not giving them intellectual, emotional support for the higher level of learning that is intended. As an example, almost all of the children are comfortably doing addition facts with numbers 1 to 10. So the curriculum now introduces ‘doubles + 1’ and it’s no longer good enough to do 3+2=5. Now the kids need to know 3+2 = 2+2+1 = 5. I applaud the idea that they are being exposed to multiple strategies and multiple ways to look at number sets. But many kids find this mostly confusing and slightly disheartening in the absence of a larger context of why doing 2+3 is fine AND there are other ways to get to the same place. I find myself in conflict with this aspect of the curriculum and wrestle with how far to deviate from ‘the standard’ in the day to day teaching (of course with the same end goal of accomplishing a certain set of learning over the year).
Fortunately, as of today I have limited or no responsibility for complying with standards. I have much to learn in how to balance the obvious wisdom and safety of strict adherence to the letter of the standards with a more flexible approach based on the welfare of the children and the ultimate goals of the standards. I tend to live at both extremes (not enough respect for the collective wisdom of apparently arbitrary rules versus overly strict compliance to obviously flawed minutia). This is particularly tricky for me because my mind tends to think in ‘systems’ and standards are simply a ‘system’ designed to accomplish certain narrow outcomes. The standards for Wall Street (regulatory and rating agency driven) were all designed to protect the clients and ensure financial stability of the regulated companies. We have all seen how well those particular standards worked in accomplishing those goals. None the less, my intention is to develop more capacity to find creativity and wisdom but to work closely in the context of external standards.

In what ways do you think a portfolio will assist you in your personal and professional life?

I had never heard of a portfolio (other than in the context of art) before taking this course. Now, having done the assigned reading and a bit of independent research, I think I understand this new, interesting aspect of life.

One of the things I am committed to is seeing my life as past, present and future in harmony. Most of us live in the past and/or the future but rarely in the now. My tendency is to live in the future, hoping to make something there that is better than what I think I have or have had. One of the things I have learned about this strategy is that the past tends to keep repeating itself because it is never fully integrated. I have spent much time lately considering my past; the things that were too painful to consider and the things I’d taken for granted. I find that this has been extremely healing for me. As I integrate my past, it becomes fuel for my present and allows the future to be whatever it will be.  

It is funny how tools come around when they’re needed. Building a portfolio is exactly a tool I need now. Just three days ago I bought a bunch of photo frames. I intended to frame and display photos from my life; people I love, people who love me, times of joy, times of achievement and times of sadness. By seeing these reminders of things in my life, I believe I will come to live more comfortably in that life, comfortably at peace with my humanity and all that implies. 

As I start my second career in education, I am trekking through a lot of history: wounds from being a mostly underachieving, troubled student, the inadequacies and acute insecurity of youth, the joy I have in learning and the gifts I have in this area as well. Starting a portfolio now will cement me in the truth of what I am doing. Already i can see adding my Graduate Degree paper (the “Why?” of this career choice) and my Individual Learning Styles paper (the “who am I as a student?” declaration). As I fill in knowledge and skills, I will add these to my portfolio, documenting my evolution. I am very curious what my field experience will teach me about my place in this world of education. I really don’t know where this path will lead me but I think this will become clearer as i observe 5th grade, middle school and even high school classes. I hope to be moved deeply somewhere and that journey to certainty will be in my portfolio. Graduation and receiving my teaching certification will be a milestone of importance beyond the obvious. For me, this is a kind of rebirth. Not only will I have completed the foundation of my academic credentials but I will have returned to the world where life for me was most wounding, traveled that world as an adult and navigated it differently and more gently. Documenting that will be meaningful far beyond the mundane. Even now, I’m pondering what that might look like and feeling the need for some artistic expression of past and present dancing.