The International Schools Review Forum

"How important are professional portfolios in job fairs? Has anyone ever been asked to show one at an interview

That depends if your asked to see it. Its not an issue of if its important or not important but how much your willing to lose an offer if asked for your portfolio and you dont have one.
If no one asks for it then no lose, but if someone does your prepared, what type of position are you willing to lose over another applicant that does have a portfolio.

What do you teach? A portfolio for the fine arts (art, theater, music) is more likely to be asked for then someone who is a math teacher. Likewise a a portfolio needs to "show" something not otherwise available. The portfolio for a math teacher isnt going to show anything more then your standard application documents. If its a digital portfolio, the only real value would be a teaching demo. For the arts however in addition to video of exhibits, theatrical performances, and music recitals, you can have scripts, photos of artistic pieces, etc.

Seeing a portfolio as an "application requirement" is not the best perspective. You should be asking yourself, what can i organize and arrange in a portfolio that will give me an edge and "sell" me. Your portfolio isnt some boring record its a marketing tool of YOU.

Ive only seen a couple portfolios in my career that added value to an applicant, so if you didnt do one it wouldnt be a huge a mistake.

In Bangkok, not one interview I had asked about a professional portfolio. Honestly, if you are a rookie, they might. If you have been around, they want to get to the nuts and bolts and simply have no time to look at your portfolio.

In my experience, the recruiter usually just asks about what they're interested in, and the applicant just talks about it. So if the school is big on tech integration, that question will be asked, and the teacher will talk through their use of twitter, wikis, blogs, etc. with no need to show actual websites. If a teacher hasn't done it, they can't talk intelligently about it. Or that's the theory.
A portfolio presents what the teacher feels is important. But the school wants to talk about what it feels is important.

@Sid

The synergy to that is when what is important to the recruiter and what is important to the candidate to show, coincide. Some of those things are easier to predict then others, and if the opportunity should arise, it is better to be prepared.

If done right they can be extremely helpful in getting you noticed, and creating things to talk about during your interview.

It is easy to do in most subjects. Don't listen to Psyguy. I don't think he knows anything about modern mathematics teaching.

Don't include crap like pictures of you teaching, or pictures of your kids working.

Include samples of resources that you have created, samples of student work. I always create a few activities per class per year with my portfolio in mind.

Attach this to your CV when you apply, even though it probably isn't asked for.

Think about what questions you will be asked at the interview. You know you are going to be asked about differentiation. Refer to some of the activities in you portfolio and talk about how you differentiated. You will probably be asked about technology. Make sure you have some examples of student work which has been created by technology. On two pages you can fit 20 - 30 scaled down screenshots of various activities you have done in class.

I would give some example screenshots of what I have successfully used in both of my previous job searches, but I don't wish to give the game away too easily.

@pgrass

What aspect of my primary position are you disagreeing with me about?

The issue is whether the recruiter understands modern mathematics pedagogy and methodology and if they want to look at what to them may very well just be proofs.

Their is a fundamental understanding in IE that any teacher has a practical expertise in classroom technology integration. PP, MS office, using a projector, etc. The glass ceiling for even the lowest level of technology proficiency is the smart board.

A basic portfolio should include among other things samples of work, lesson plans and course outlines/syllabi.

You may not be asked about differentiation, some schools are very homogeneous. You may not be asked about technology, some schools dont have any, or the recruiter isnt proficient in it. Though it wouldnt be unusual to plan for those questions, they are common.

The question was "How important are professional portfolios in job fairs? Has anyone ever been asked to show one at an interview?" and that was the answer I was looking for. I didn't ask for advice on how to put one together or what it should be composed of.

@PsyGuy, do you have to hijack every post with your ramblings? I hope in the future you will ignore any posts I put here as from reading through this forum I have no interest in hearing what you have to say about anything. Nothing personal, only I am looking for firsthand answers to a question and not some rambling off topic nonsense which will only lead to a debate regarding your character, knowledge etc etc, which I am not interested in.
You have plenty of opportunities to start your posts with hijacking someone else's.

I like to see them - especially those of primary/elementary candidates, since the portfolios help to give a flavour of what their classrooms look like. That said, I only ask to look at them if I can see the candidate has brought a portfolio to the interview, and it wouldn't be a black mark if she hadn't.

@Walter

Did you perhaps mean "and it wouldn't be a black mark if THEY hadn't" as opposed to "and it wouldn't be a black mark if SHE hadn't"?

Dave Jaw correcting someone else's grammar.
It's called agreement, Dave. Given that no one ever agrees with you, I realize you have a handicap.
Essentially, when you use a noun and then refer to that same noun with a pronoun, the two have to "agree". I used a singular noun in the sentence: "the candidate". Consequently, I used a singular pronoun in the second part of the sentence: "she".
It used to be the convention that one used the masculine singular (he) in such cases, but that fell out of fashion many years ago because of the implicit sexism in such a presumption. Those who wished to be politically correct then replaced the "he" with "she". As it happens, I use "she" because I interview and hire more females than males. I could, of course, have used the extremely ugly (s)he form, but that wouldn't be my style. What I could NEVER do is use the extremely stupid form of employing a plural pronoun "they" to refer to a singular noun "candidate".
Got it, Dave? If not, I'm happy to try to do a cartoon explanation.

@Walter

I always thought you were a sexist, and you still have that reading fluency problem.
You used THEIR in the first sentence "what THEIR classrooms looked like" . An appropriate gender neutral term, and she in the last sentence,"a black mark if SHE hadn't", a gender specific term.

Men can't be elementary school teachers, only women teach primary?

However, if you have a "it's okay for me to be sexist because I sit in the big chair behind the big desk" cartoon Id love to see it .

@Micky

My comments were on topic, but this isnt "your" post. This is a public forum, and addresses a wide readership. This isnt a private or personal conversation with you.

I only reply to posts I have direct experience or rely on trusted sources, you are of course free to disregard and ignore any posts I write.

If completely ignored, trolls usually go away. They like the attention, makes them feel important, but without it they shrivel up and die. (or find another site to hijack)