Preparing a Teaching Portfolio
Increasingly, universities ask job candidates to provide a teaching portfolio when applying for a position. As you look towards graduation, it is much easier to construct such a portfolio by adding to it after each semester rather than collating several years of teaching experience at one time. Each course that you teach is, in fact, an opportunity to collect feedback and material that illustrates your teaching practices to potential employers.

What is a teaching portfolio?
According to the Center for Teaching Advancement and Assessment Research, a teaching portfolio is “a documented statement of a faculty member's teaching responsibilities, philosophy, goals and accomplishments as a teacher.” It is flexible, and you may choose to highlight different aspects of your teaching depending on your experience and the needs of your potential employer.

Generally, a teaching portfolio has three components: teaching responsibilities, teaching philosophy and goals, and evidence of effective teaching.

The teaching responsibilities section is perhaps the most straightforward. It answers the question “What did I do?” You may list what courses you taught, when you taught them, and detail the format of the course. This section should contain a narrative describing other relevant details of the course and material covered. You may also include syllabi and other course data, as well as a description of any out-of-classroom mentoring that you do.

The teaching philosophy section answers the question “Why do I teach as I do?” This section may also be known to TAs as a teaching statement. This portion of the portfolio is the most reflective, allowing you to explain your teaching methodology. In it, you should detail what your goals were for students and how you set out to help them reach those goals. You may want to describe ways that you have sought to improve your teaching and include the outcomes of those changes. You should also reflect on your teaching goals for the next five years.

Finally, the evidence section is a chance to collect outside data illustrating how you accomplished the goals in your teaching philosophy statement. This section is perhaps the most difficult to compile in retrospect; whereas, if you have a teaching portfolio in mind throughout the semester, you may be active in collecting useful material to include while your course is in progress. It may include descriptions of creative instructional techniques, documentation of teaching grants or awards, student and peer evaluations, letters from students, or other applicable data. You may ask your department chair or another appropriate person who is familiar with your teaching and grading practices to observe your class and write a statement regarding the quality of your work.

Some materials are appropriate to include but may not seem as obvious to collect. For example, you may wish to show actual student work with your comments to illustrate a range of student performance and how you respond to it. You may choose to include a video of your teaching. You may further include articles about teaching that you have submitted to scholarly journals or documentation of teaching workshops that you have attended. The portfolio needs to be flexible, allowing you to adapt it as needed and, if it seems a good illustration of your teaching, you may include any sort of material, whether listed above or not.

Why prepare a teaching portfolio?
A teaching portfolio is an invaluable resource to you as you progress through your career. Whether required or not, including an executive summary of your teaching portfolio in job applications can make you stand out as a candidate who takes teaching seriously and has documentation to support it. Having such a document prepared and polished in advance makes it clear that you have thought deeply about your teaching and will continue to give it weight in the future. Further, it can make talking about teaching in job interviews less stressful since you will have already thought about your teaching habits and have evidence of quality instruction immediately at hand.

Beyond interviews, a teaching portfolio is of value throughout your career. Many universities require a teaching portfolio for tenure and promotion decisions. Beginning your teaching portfolio now will make preparation less hectic as you progress to these future steps in your career.

Even if you do not intend to become a professor, a teaching portfolio is still of value. Certainly, your experience as a TA has helped you to hone certain communication and organization skills that will be an asset to you as you progress in your career. A teaching portfolio can help highlight and demonstrate such skills.

In general, making a conscientious effort to keep teaching material organized from semester to semester will help you to more easily access appropriate information as it is needed from time to time in your career.

Where can I learn more about teaching portfolios?
The Center for Teaching Advancement and Assessment Research holds periodic workshops on writing a teaching portfolio. There will be several of these scheduled during the 2008-2009 academic year.

For even more depth, two highly recommended resources are:

• AAHE Monograph, The Teaching Portfolio: Capturing the Scholarship of Teaching Washington, DC: AAHE Publications, 1991 [Available in CTAAR Library]


• Seldin, Peter The Teaching Portfolio, Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company, 1991. [Available in CTAAR library]

As you wrap up another semester as a TA, the time is perfect to collect resources and begin your teaching portfolio. Use the transition between semesters as a time to reflect on your teaching and start constructing a document that will serve you well for years to come.