After you have submitted your Application Packet to DOE, they will assess it and reply by letter indicating which requirements and standards you have met, and which you might still have to meet. For those unmet standards, you will address gaps in knowledge and skill through further training, education, mentoring, self-study, and so forth, and provide evidence to DOE of these gains in a performance portfolio. This evidence must follow the evaluation rubrics in the ABE Teacher's Guidelines. Sabes has recently put together a SABES Guide to the Guidelines for Route 4 teachers with running annotations on the official Guidelines, as a way of making them more user friendly. For a copy of the SABES Guide, please send an email to Carey Reid with your address.

Coursework from colleges or 10+PDP Trainings	Examples of your teaching materials	Examples of your learners' work	Descriptions of staff development training
Self-Directed Study	Distance Learning		Your Portfolio

Here are some key points to keep in mind regarding your performance portfolio. First, all evidence that you submit for meeting required standards is either one of two types: "coursework" or "experiential". "Coursework" is college courses or trainings in which you earned 10 or more Professional Development Points, or PDPs. "Experiential" evidence is actual teaching, reading, staff development of less than 10 PDPs, presentations, mentorings, collaborations, and so forth. A standard can be covered by a course(s), one piece/set of experiential evidence, or a combination of both. By the same token, one piece of evidence--e.g. college course or lesson plan--can be used to cover more than one standard. Basically, you document that you did something (with “evidentiary documentation," such as a transcript, or a set of lesson plans), then explain how the evidence covers the standard (with brief “coursework statements” or “explanatory statements”).

A second important point is that "more" is not necessarily "better". In fact, the Guidelines specify that coursework and explanatory statements for each standard can be no longer than two typed pages. In fact, the entire portfolio from a Route 4 candidate must be submitted in a one-inch binder! Basically, the Review Panel wants to know: "Does this candidate have the knowledge or skills needed to meet required standards?"

To help you plan out your portfolio, SABES has developed self-assessment worksheets for Route 3 and Route 4 teachers in both MS Word and PDF. These worksheets will help you to determine which standards you've already met—through coursework or experience—and which you still need to meet, through further training. To help with that further training SABES has been collecting resources by standard. These lists of books, articles, Websites, and other forms are annotated to help you make decisions on what resources you might want to get for yourself, as well as location information. E.g., many of these resources can be found at your Regional Resource Center library, or can be downloaded from the Web. SABES will add to and refine these lists over time. Candidates are also invited to contact People Who Can Help You, our roster of SABES staff members and license-seeking teachers who are willing to help you find resources and answer questions you might have.

SABES has also been collecting samples of good explanatory statements from successful portfolios, as well as solid lesson plans that have worked well as portfolio exhibits. If you want to see these samples, click here. We'll be adding to this collection in the future.