Documenting Your Teaching:
The Teaching Portfolio

Applications for the Teaching Portfolio

• Provide evidence of effective teaching
• Increase professional accountability by putting you in charge of monitoring, improving, and ensuring the quality of teaching
• Increase reflection and discussion of the purposes, strategies, results, and standards of teaching
• Foster a culture of teaching and learning where both are valued, talked about, and continuously improved
• Give you control over your teaching and how you choose to define it and yourself as a teacher
• Provide the reader with insight as to what you think about teaching
• Contribute to your continued development and excellence in education

Although a teaching portfolio is often characterized as a documented statement of one's teaching responsibilities, philosophy, goals, and accomplishments as a teacher, what goes into a portfolio depends on its intended purpose. The portfolio should be a flexible document that can be used in a variety of ways, consistent with the needs and interests of the one who compiles it. For example, a graduate teaching assistant's portfolio might include a reflective statement on teaching, a brief description of the courses taught, and a summary of student ratings. In contrast, the content of a portfolio submitted for promotion and tenure review would be more comprehensive, including representative course materials, a description of changes in content and methods that have been made over a period of time, illustrations of student learning, and supporting documentation.

Portfolio Structure

The basic structure of a teaching portfolio can be adjusted to suit the needs of any graduate teaching assistant. In general, the teaching portfolio consists of three major components:

• Reflective commentary (a teaching philosophy statement)
• Evidence of teaching
• Self-assessment

General guidelines for preparing a portfolio

Reflective commentary

This component includes a statement of teaching philosophy and goals describing your philosophy of teaching and your beliefs about how students learn. To help you identify and rank the importance of your teaching goals, you may wish to complete Angelo & Cross's online Teaching Goals Inventory. It may be helpful to incorporate the mission statement of your department/academic discipline and campus; in some cases, the statement of teaching philosophy should reflect the culture of your institution. Reflective annotations attached to particular materials are just as useful as longer, reflective essays on course design and philosophy. The purpose of the reflective statements is to reveal the "pedagogical thinking" behind your teaching and to explain why various items are included in the your portfolio and what these items "tell" about your teaching.

Evidence of effective teaching

In this section, your portfolio offers supporting evidence, including, but not limited to selected materials generated in the process of teaching and learning:

• sample course syllabi, assignments, exams
• methods used to evaluate/improve teaching
• results of students' evaluations
• samples of completed student work

Self-assessment

This component may overlap with the reflective component because it typically involves a narrative that summarizes your work as a teacher and explains the relevance of the evidence contained in the portfolio to support your philosophy of teaching and your goals for teaching and learning. Hutchings (1998) notes that a good portfolio should not only explain and document, but evaluate. Use the process of developing a teaching portfolio to take stock of what is working, how it can be improved, and the steps taken toward possible improvement.

Reader aids

To help the reader find information easily, your portfolio should include such items as a table of contents and a description of the contexts of your teaching (title of course(s), terms taught, number of students enrolled, type of course).

Organizing Principle

James Long and Kenneth Bain of Northwestern University ("Recasting the Teaching Portfolio," The Teaching Professor, December 1997) view the teaching portfolio as an argument rather than a "container" of the products and descriptions of teaching. Similarly, Pat Hutchings (1998) encourages the use of an "organizing principle" or a controlling idea around which materials can be selected, organized and reflected upon.

Key tasks of teaching the field

This organizing principle is modeled after the AAHE monograph on the teaching portfolio. It identifies four generic tasks: course planning and preparation, classroom practice (actual teaching), evaluating student learning and providing feedback, and keeping up with the field in areas related to teaching performance. The idea is to use an appropriate set of tasks to give structure and coherence to your portfolio.

Teaching goals (goals for student learning)

Using this principle, the statement of teaching philosophy lays out the thesis ("this is what I believe about good teaching") and provides the scaffolding for the evidence that follows. The porfolio continues with evidence that supports your goals, and reflective statements that illuminate your thinking about achieveing these goals.

Analogy to a scholarly project (course portfolio)

This principle focuses on teaching and learning in a particular, selected course and may be thought of as a "course portfolio." The course portfolio starts with the course syllabus, with explicit goals for students in the course; includes homework assignments, copies of exams, and course projects as evidence of the direction of the course toward its goals; and is completed by a reflective memo on the appropriateness of the course goals, the sudents' progress on the goals, and recommendations for future directions. It is a natural approach for TAs who've only taught one course. Here are some questions to address in a course portfolio:

• What are you trying to accomplish?
• Why were these goals selected?
• Did the course meet the goals? How do you know?
• What problems were encountered in meeting the goals?
• How did you conduct the course?
• How did you challenge the students?
• What changes in topics, materials, and assignments are necessary?

Recommendations for Building a Teaching Portfolio

The purpose of a teaching portfolio is to build a collection of evidence that gives direction for growth and documents changes in your teaching. A good portfolio provides a guide for developing overall instructional abilities, for course development/ improvement, and for sharing instructional knowledge with colleagues. One important function of the teaching portfolio is to make teaching public.We recommends that graduate teaching assistants work collaboratively with their supervising faculty to create teaching portfolios. Share your "work in progress" with peers, both within and outside your department. The process should involve interaction and mentoring. Other recommendations:

• Be selective in gathering evidence and documentation.
• Be clear and concise in your reflective comments.
• Don't make any claims about your teaching that you can't document.
• View your portfolio as a work in progress - emphasize development and improvement.
• Don't try to include all your teaching materials - your portfolio will grow too cumbersome and nobody will read it.
• Keep the portfolio lean - periodically reassess its contents to be sure it is current and clearly represents your philosophy of teaching.

Support from the Office of Graduate Studies for Portfolio Development

For feedback on your teaching portfolio or for more information on constructing a teaching portfolio, contact Dr. Laurie Bellows, Office of Graduate Studies.