According to Helen Barrett (2000), the creation of a portfolio often involves a five-stage development process:

• contextualizing
• collecting
• reflecting
• implementing
• presenting

The following pages will take you through these 5 stages, in hopes that you will become clearer about what is usually included in an educator’s folio (and all portfolios for that matter) and why.

Finally, know that even though these 5 steps are listed sequentially, often this process is recursive and ‘messy’ and thus does not always progress sequentially.

Let’s get started.