You can think of your final, public portfolio as a narrative that encapsulates your conception of your teaching of a single course within your institution during a single term. You will construct this portfolio in increments, critiquing one another's initial efforts prior to revising and "publishing" your portfolio. Providing a coherent narrative voice that someone else will want to read will be one of the key challenges.
Choose whatever form and format you find most convenient to work in, keeping in mind that a "public" version of the portfolio will be displayed in the Internet-accessible portfolio repository associated with this project. Although you are free to include whatever you like in the final portfolio, it will help to have some common parts during the development phase, if only so that we can talk together about the same sorts of things at our monthly sessions. These parts will be: your course objectives, the context in which you teach, your course content, your teaching methods, your philosophy that underlies how you teach this course, an examimination of student learning, and a commentary on how you assess student work and what you value about their work.
You will create and revise your portfolio in increments. For each portfolio increment, you will:
Each "deliverable" at the protected level is an artifact/annotation pair. The "artifact" is one or more documents that describes some aspect of your practice or the work of your students (e.g. your method of teaching, your syllabus, homeworks, study guides, a piece of student work). These artifacts need not be a verbatim course document, but might be summarized or drawn from an existing document. For instance, in your "Content" section, you might not want to include your entire course syllabus and homeworks, but instead summarize the key content areas from the syllabus and one or two sample homeworks. In selecting your artifacts, it will be important to consider who your audience is and what you want to convey to this audience. The important point about the artifact is that it describe, that it answer "What?" questions, e.g. What is the content of your course? What methods do you use?
The "annotation" provides a commentary on the artifacts. The commentary generally addresses the significance of the artifacts, answering "Why?" questions, e.g. Why do you teach X before Y? Why do you use method Z to teach a particular unit?
The protected portfolio increments, along with the session discussion and your reflections, will serve as a basis for your public portfolio increments. The public increments will necessarily lag the corresponding protected increments by one or more sessions to provide time for critique, reflection, and revision.
Your public portfolios will be improved through critique of your public increments. Each public increment will be reviewed by two other participants. These will be done via email within two weeks of the previous session. The schedule of who reviews which public portfolio increments on which dates, as well as the review form can be found via the following links. Please use those parts of the review form that are appropriate to the portfolio increment that you are reviewing.
| Reviewer Schedule | Review Form |
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Please bring your protected and public increments on a flash drive that you can transfer to Josh's laptop each session, or on a CD. This will then be posted to the Commons Participant Portfolio page.
Artifact: What are your course goals? What do you want students to learn? What skills do you want them to acquire? What practices? What knowledge?
Annotation: Why do you have these particular goals?
Artifact: A context document, that addresses: how your course "fits" in your program and within the discipline as a whole (consider a "pre-requisite tree" to describe fit within degree programs); who your students are (% who work, level of preparation, where students are from, demographics); what constraints you operate under (e.g. budgetary, credit hours, lab availability, textbook decision-making).
Annotation: Why are these aspects of context significant? How do they affect your course design and teaching?
Artifact: One or more documents that that addresses your course content. This will likely include parts of your syllabus and perhaps other documents that describes such things as topics covered, order of topics, duration of each topic, language and textbook used, etc. This artifact should describe the basic course anatomy, the bones and sinews of the course. You might want to include some key homework or project descriptions. Also, please bring in the textbook you use for your course, and any other physical (or virtual) artifact that you think would be helpful to share and discuss.
Annotation: Answer the "Why" question with respect to your main syllabus choices (e.g. "Why these topics?" "Why this order"?, "Why this language?").
Artifact: A description of the teaching methods that you use in your course. What methods do you generally use for teaching what things? What methods do you use for specific parts of your course? Possible artifacts also include handouts that you use in teaching (e.g. in-class problem solving or group instructions).
Annotation: Answer the "Why" question with respect to your main method choices (e.g. "Why this method for teaching this concept or skill?").
Your audience(s), purpose(s) of your portfolio, your course goals, and course/institutional context.
Artifact and Annotation (combined): What do you believe about student learning that shapes your decisions about goals, course design, methods, etc. related to this course? What is your philosophy for teaching this course?
The content and methods of your course.
Artifact:Sample student work, possibly aggregated, summarized, or "processed" in some fashion.
Annotation:Why did you choose this work to include? What is its significance? What does it tell you about student learning? Are students achieving the learning goals your set for them? Does the work that you ask students to do provide evidence for the learning goals that you set for them?
Artifact: graded student work.
Annotation: Why do you grade the way that you do? What does your commentary on student work convey to students? What does it say about who you are and what you value as a teacher?
Additional annotation for discussion only: Grading rationale for the assignments that we are grading in common.
Artifacts: 1) Peer observation documents used by you and your observer. 2) Descriptive parts of your self observation document.
Annotations: 1) What did you learn about your teaching by being observed? By being an observer? What might you do differently the next time, in either role? 2) Reflective parts of your self observation document.
Note: You might not want to include this annotation in your public portfolio; but please bring it for discussion.
Artifact: Draft of Entire Portfolio.
Artifact:Final Portfolio