Assessing pre-service teacher learning and professional competency through portfolios and roundtables: Keeping an eye on the job Jo-Anne Reid University of New England joreid@metz.une.edu.au Sandra Frid Curtin University of Technology frids@spectrum.curtin.edu.au Paper presented to the annual conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education, Perth, December 2001 This is a report of the final phase of an ongoing study into the potential of professional portfolio development as a form of reflection and assessment within a 4-year BEd program for primary teachers. The project began in 1998 and since that time has tracked a small group of pre-service teachers working each year on the production of teaching portfolios that demonstrate their ongoing learning in a wide range of teaching competencies. Drawing on theories of human subjectivity formed in and through social practices, this research has examined how pre-service teachers have been both empowered and limited in their creation of individual, unique 'teaching selves'. In this final phase of the study, implementation of a culminating authentic assessment strategy - roundtables - is examined in relation to the goals of a pre-service teacher education program. In particular, there is a focus on how development of the pre-service teachers' professional knowledge and skills has been facilitated by portfolio development, and also on what 'other people' are able to assess of these teachers' capacities from their portfolios and roundtable sessions. In this way, the views and experiences of various stakeholders in teacher education are examined in relation to implementation of an innovative and flexible form of teacher assessment. In this paper we argue that the use of Professional Portfolios in teacher education has great potential for promoting educational change in: university teaching and assessment practices; the content and processes of teacher education curricula and school experience; and conceptions of what it means as a teacher to be ‘professional’. INTRODUCTION The importance of a study into pre-service teacher Professional Portfolios lies in the fact that in an education program there is a tension between development of the individual as a professional and the demands of a professional program that must ensure ‘technical competency’. Students engage in their education studies with their own histories, belief systems, goals, values, learning styles and world views, and therefore interact with learning experiences in many and sometimes unpredictable ways. At the same time, they all differ as to their initial degrees of attainment of