Year 4 Portfolio Critique and Hopes for Year 5 Portfolio

Overall, I was very pleased with the way my Year 4 Portfolio turned out. For starters, I was able to include a lot of good samples of work that I feel truly represent my abilities and strengths as a teacher. For example in the section Two Examples of Work Completed in Professional Education Courses, I included a lesson on fact and opinion that I had created for my EDUC 414 Creative Expressions class. Since the lesson was done around the time of Halloween, I decided to incorporate the holiday into the lesson as well as different aspects of the arts and creativity. To start off, I had the students sing a song titled “Francine the Nice Witch” which was sung to the tune of “Frosty the Snowman”. After singing through the songs a few times, I had the students stand up and either create “F” or “O” with their arms in order to show if each line in the song represented a fact or opinion. Afterward, I had the students decorate a picture of something that represented Halloween and had them write both a fact and opinion statement about the picture or the holiday itself. I feel that this shows my strengths as a teacher because it shows that I like to bring creativity into my lessons. This artifact also shows that I consider all learning styles while creating my lessons to ensure that each child has a fair chance at learning the presented information.

I was also happy with the overall look of my portfolio. I ensured to make sure that my tabs stuck out far enough this time because when I had handed in my first portfolio, they did not. I also wanted to have a common theme for this portfolio, so I found decorated paper that I felt represented me and my passion for elementary teaching and incorporated it throughout the entire portfolio.

For my Year 5 Portfolio, I hope to make my action research artifact a better representative of who I am as a teacher. For my Year 4 Portfolio, I decided to include my action research assignment from Fall semester of my participant year which included a power point slide presentation of the data that I had collected. On my next portfolio, I hope to include my action research that I complete this year. With that said, I will make sure that I include all the aspects of this project such as the brief, notes from the data taking process, my charts, and my final paper. I think that if I include all of these aspects, my teaching strengths will show.