Preparing a Teaching Portfolio

by Stephen Winick

from the SAS Center for Teaching and Learning 
at the University of Pennsylvania

A teaching portfolio is a collection of artifacts that document the teaching you have done, presented in a visually attractive and easy-to-access way. The documents may include syllabi, handouts, bibliographies, lecture notes, exercises, slides or video presentations, World Wide Web pages, and any number of other possibilities. For the presentation, a binder with color-coded folders is a good place to start, but you may want to be more creative.

The purpose of the portfolio is to show off your skills in the best possible light. Consider what teaching skills you have that you are particularly proud of. Think about ways in which you can document those skills and include them in your portfolio. 
 

Why Do You Need One?

Documenting your teaching can be important to you in many ways. It can help you get a job, it can help you keep moving on your career path, and it can help you assess your own personal and professional growth. In addition, a good teaching portfolio can actually make you a better teacher. 

Getting a Job

If teaching is important to you, you should be looking at jobs that stress teaching skills, be they in the academic or the corporate world. In order to get such a job, you will need to present yourself as someone who has done a significant amount of teaching, and as someone who has put time, energy and thought into teaching. A strong portfolio documenting your teaching will help you demonstrate your teaching abilities in the most concrete way possible. 

Career Advancement

In any job where teaching is expected of you, you will be judged partly on the basis of how well you teach and how much effort you put into teaching. The skills you build now in developing portfolios--the same skills that can help you get a teaching job--will continue to serve you once you have that job. 

Improving your Teaching

Finally, keeping a record of your teaching can actually help you improve as a teacher. By examining the documentation you produce, you can discover a lot about what works for you in the classroom and what doesn't. You can apply this insight to your future classes, ensuring that you will be happier and more effective in the classroom. 

What Goes in a Teaching Portfolio?

There are many possible pieces to a portfolio. It is best to keep in mind what you think your own strengths are as a teacher and play to your strengths. If you are a dynamic personality in the classroom, a videotape of your teaching may convey this. If you are a witty writer and use that to keep your students interested in problem sets or exercises, make sure you include examples of such exercises.

It is a good idea to break down the portfolio into several categories. I suggest six: a statement of teaching philosophy, course content, presentation, changes and improvements in your teaching, student assessments of your teaching, and faculty assessments of your teaching. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive. A World Wide Web site for a course, in addition to being innovative presentation is also excellent documentation of content.. Keep in mind that these six categories may not work for everyone. Remember, this is about how to best get across your strengths. 

Teaching Philosophy

This is often a difficult and thorny question for beginning teachers. What do you think you can add to the world by teaching? Why do you think it is important to teach? What goals does good teaching accomplish? How do you think your teaching specifically meets those goals? 
If you spend a few hours thinking about this problem for your portfolio, you may find that your teaching style has not been serving your teaching philosophy as well as it could. This is normal; as beginning teachers, many of us emulate our own professors rather than working on a new strategy of our own. Treat this as an opportunity to learn about how you teach and about how you could improve as a teacher.

Content

For each course you teach, you should be able to summarize the content and provide documentary examples. Syllabi with detailed week-by-week outlines of what is to be covered, bibliographies, study guides or review sheets, homework assignments, lecture notes, etc.... High-quality student work is also a plus here; it shows not only what you intended to teach, but what somebody actually learned from you. A World Wide Web site is a great way to keep the content for your course organized and accessible, and it also doubles as terrific documentation when you're done! 

Presentation

If someone visited your classroom, what would they experience? What would they see and hear? How would your style of presentation help them learn? Documenting this can be thorny, because the classroom environment cannot be duplicated before a search committee; even if they have you give a guest lecture or two, it will be in an unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar students, and with the awareness that you are being scrutinized--chances are it won't be your best performance.

To give them an idea of what they would experience in your classroom, try to videotape yourself teaching a few times (see our brochure: Feedback From the Experts). Keep examples of audio-visual presentations you have used. Write summaries of in-class exercises and keep track of how well they worked. Include letters from students, colleagues and faculty that specifically address your style.

Try to find a piece of documentary evidence for every specific skill you feel you excel in. If you are particularly good at going over problems so that students understand them, a letter from a student praising this ability, complemented by a sample problem, and a written version of how you would work through it, will convey both your skill and your enthusiasm for helping students solve problems.

If you have an innovative style or technique of presentation, find ways to document that as well. For example, if you like to have students debate one another over the issues in your course, have student "secretaries" on both sides summarize the debate and present their team's final arguments in writing. That way, you have a final record of the debate which is helpful not only in documenting the experience, but also in assessing how well the debate worked. 

Changes and Improvements

This category can encompass several sub-categories. One might be changes and improvements to the individual courses that you teach. If you have taught a course more than once, you will want to show how the content and presentation changed each time you taught it. This shows that you are constantly striving to improve the courses you offer. It also demonstrates that you are sensitive enough to know what is not working and resourceful enough to think of new content and new strategies to make it work better. For this, you will simply want to document the course separately each time, and then prepare a chart or a brief statement explaining the changes you made and why.

More generally, you want to demonstrate how your teaching has changed independently of course content. Did you move from a lecture to a discussion-based format? Did you begin to use more technology--audio, video, computer? Why? Keep in mind your teaching philosophy here. Based on that philosophy, how did the changes you made in your teaching improve your performance? Finally, how has your philosophy of teaching itself developed? Prepare a brief statement of these developments for your portfolio. 

Student Assessments

Obviously, the efficacy of a teacher cannot be determined without reference to learners. How good a teacher you are is directly related to how much and how well students feel they learned from you. Including some form of student feedback is essential. At minimum, SCUE form results can be summarized and included. Well-written letters from students praising your abilities as a teacher are a big plus--try to figure out who is really interested in the class and ask them for a letter after the course ends. Keep in mind that there may be enthusiastic students who are quiet or shy for personal or cultural reasons, and that you therefore may not know who may write glowingly of you. You should therefore try to have a mid-semester and end-of-semester evaluation form of your own which asks open-ended questions. That can provide you with good quotations from quieter students who you did not know were so enthusiastic. 

Faculty Assessments

Finally, make sure that a faculty member (or more than one if possible!) has seen you teach. Approach some of your professors and invite them to your class. Explain to them that you really want their feedback and that a recommendation from them would mean a lot to you. If you are a TA, try to make sure that the professor does not leave you in charge only when he or she has to be elsewhere; make sure he or she actually sees you teaching at least a few times. If you teach recitation sections, ask the professor to attend one of them. Explain that you would like a recommendation for your teaching portfolio.
Needless to say, be careful to have a smooth, well-thought-out class on the day your professor attends. On the other hand, do not over-prepare or try to do something wildly out of the ordinary. You want your professor's assessment to reflect your true teaching style, or else it may conflict with your own or your students' descriptions of your teaching. 

Final Thought

A teaching portfolio doesn't have to be a chore. It will be fun to look at what you've accomplished as a teacher in a relatively short time. If you go into academia, you may want to remember the first courses you taught--it will help you relate to your own graduate students as they take their first steps toward teaching.