ASSESSING AND IMPROVING YOUR TEACHING:
Teaching Portfolios
Many departments are encouraging TAs to develop teaching portfolios. Teaching portfolios can serve both developmental and evaluative functions. As developmental documents, they can be a way for you to keep track of your growth as a teacher. In a developmental portfolio, you might include course syllabi, typical class activities and exercises, representative assignments and student work, observations about grading strategies, and perhaps most important, notes to yourself about what worked well and what might work better next time.
As documents for evaluation, teaching portfolios can be a way for you to present your teaching skills and experience to potential employers. Unlike the developmental portfolio, the evaluative portfolio is more concise and selective and often contains a reflective statement in which the candidate discusses his/her teaching philosophy.
Despite this difference in audience and purpose, the evaluative portfolio is difficult to write without the resources of the developmental portfolio. Therefore, it is a good idea to get into the habit of collecting and reflecting on your teaching materials early in your career, whatever your TA responsibilities happen to be.
For more information about teaching porftolios, see:
http://depts.washington.edu/cidrweb/teachingportfolio.html
Portfolio Checklist
- How can you use a teaching portfolio?
As a process (the developmental portfolio):- To record your teaching experiences over time
- To provide themes and evidence for your evaluative portfolio
- To communicate your teaching to a potential employer
- To communicate your teaching to students, colleagues, community
- What can you put into a teaching portfolio?
- Teaching experience and responsibilities
- Teaching philosophy
- Teaching methods and strategies
- Efforts to improve teaching: (observations, critiques, workshops, experiments in pedagogy and methodology
- Teaching goals: short- and long-term
- Appendices (annotated course materials, student ratings and other student feedback, peer and supervisor reviews)
- How can you begin to develop a teaching portfolio?
- Save course materials for documentation (syllabi, sample assignments, etc.)
- Reflect on your teaching individually and with others
- Reflect on student learning in your field
- Get feedback from several sources: students, peers, supervisors, video
- Seek out teaching opportunities