Assessing accomplished teaching with reliability and validity: The ACER Portfolio Project

We know that good teachers are worth their weight in gold. But if good teaching is to be truly valued, the teaching profession must be able to demonstrate that it can evaluate itself in ways that are reliable, valid and fair. This capacity is central to any profession. It is also central to lifting the status of teaching, rewarding accomplished teaching and enabling teaching to complete with other professions for our ablest graduates. Recent OECD reports emphasise the necessity of strengthening the teaching profession, which depends upon widespread use of evidence-based teaching practices. Building the capacity for evaluation is the purpose of the ACER Portfolio Project: to develop valid and feasible methods by which teachers can demonstrate the ways in which they meet the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers at the Highly Accomplished level. This presentation reviews the work of the Portfolio Project in developing an assessment and evaluation framework for Highly Accomplished teaching, piloting the assessment tasks with teachers, training assessors, setting standards, and identifying benchmarks for highly accomplished teaching.