The portfolio-building approach we have designed responds to a variety of needs–personal, pedagogical, and program related–at different stages of a students' progress, from admission to graduation. We have chosen four main stages for the process, within which students build toward "decision points" in their teacher training:

• Stage 1: builds on successful completion of introductory courses in Teacher's college and content areas, culminating in student becoming Teacher Education Aspirant.
• Stage 2: culminates in admission to the Teacher Education Curriculum
• Stage 3: culminates in Admission to Student Teaching
• Stage 4: culminates in graduation and licensure.

Each stage develops with increasing complexity. At Stage 1, students create a self-assessment document or "autobiography" that represents them as learners and individuals, focusing on their initial reflections about the nature of teaching and their personal and professional involvement in it. Stage 2 focuses on gathering artifacts such as written projects, papers, and teachers' evaluations to demonstrate engagement with and mastery of skills and concepts leading to formal acceptance into the Teacher Education Curriculum. During Stage 3, students select from their body of increasingly extensive artifacts (essays, evaluations, video clips of presentations, lesson plans, etc.), both in education and content areas, to demonstrate sufficient mastery of concepts and procedures to be admitted to student teaching. Stage 4 adds the student teaching experience to the mix; students select artifacts inherent in this program (lesson plans, substantial video of classroom performance, supervisors' evaluations, etc.) to add to the prior collection, with the aim of demonstrating sufficient mastery of all stages for subsequent licensure.

Central to our concept is a large relational database of multimedia digital artifacts. This becomes a container for the papers, lesson plans, video and audio clips, and so on, of all teacher education students. Artifacts in the database are linked to state and ISTE standards, allowing for verification that each teacher education student has satisfactorily completed all requirements for licensure.