An electronic performance portfolio can lift a candidate off the resume page and on to a virtual stage. A principal can literally watch as the teacher candidate performs on the classroom stage. Internet recruitment and candidate selection is becoming an important tool to make hiring decisions. To a great degree electronic performance portfolios have the capacity to demonstrate charisma, innovative personalities, and positive values that fit the instructional environment (Kennedy’s dimensions of qualified competent teachers). Understanding and interpreting student assessment results is another criterion that electronic portfolio examination allows the principal to determine. Administrators filling classroom vacancies cannot afford to ignore the importance of teacher assessment skill in their content area. The online performance portfolio works for both the teacher candidate and the employer to accomplish a quality hiring decision.
Ncpea publications
This manuscript has been peer-reviewed, accepted, and endorsed by the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration (NCPEA) as a significant contribution to the scholarship and practice of education administration. In addition to publication in the Connexions Content Commons, this module is published in the
NCPEA Handbook of Online Instruction and Programs in Education Leadership, ISBN 978-1-4507-7263-1.
Editors
- Janet Tareilo, Stephen F. Austin State University
- Brad Bizzell, Virginia Tech
Associate Editors
- Beverly Irby, Sam Houston State University
- Rosemary Papa, Northern Arizona University
- Thomas Valesky, Florida Gulf Coast University
- Theodore Creighton, Virginia Tech
About the Authors
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Dr. Watkins has been a Missouri educator for over thirty years working in P-12 schools as teacher, building administrator, and elementary director. He is currently a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Counseling at Southeast Missouri State University. He has been with University for twelve years since leaving the public schools.
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Dr. Ruth Ann Roberts is currently a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Counseling at Southeast Missouri State University and the Director of the Educational Doctoral Program. Prior to her position at Missouri State, she served as a teacher, principal, and curriculum director, for the Missouri public schools.
Introduction
Each year retirements, transfers, or resignations make it necessary for school administrators to search for and evaluate candidates who can skillfully fill vacancies. Determining quality organizational fit as well as professional aptitudes for working with students by simply poring over resumes, reading what is shared on application blanks and reviewing how they posture at the interview can be misleading and misinterpreted. Discovering true teacher quality can better be evaluated by using online tools that provide expanded media. Such tools allow the principal to see inside a candidate’s process of reflecting on, planning for, and assessing learning. Use of electronic portfolios as well as conducting teaching episodes is already standard practice in many teacher education programs. All that is left is for students to use such tools to market themselves as quality candidates and for principals to use such powerful in-depth information to critically review a prospective candidate.
