A portfolio is a collection of evidence of your teaching practice and development, and can include syllabi, course activities, examples of student work and feedback, with your reflections on each of these.
Introduction to Teaching Portfolios
There are many models of portfolios, but the two basic types are developmental portfolios and promotional portfolios. In either case, a portfolio documents your educational accomplishments. It presents quantitative and qualitative evidence or your reflective practice as a teacher, and your attempts at continuous improvement based on feedback.
The types of evidence typically included focus on your:
- Teaching
- Mentoring
- Advising
- Curriculum development
- Assessment
- Educational leadership
- Scholarly teaching publications
- Innovations
The challenges of building a portfolio
It can initially be a daunting task, especially if there is no developmental model. It can be time consuming, so you may need to make choices about your focus. Getting evidence can be challenging if it is not systematically collected over time. Planning and organizing your process with some guidance will be important!
The benefits of building a portfolio
One of the key benefits is that it highlights the importance of teaching if done in a department or school. Second, this process will add rigor the teaching evaluation beyond student evaluations. This is important because while student evaluations are an important piece of feedback, they can also demonstrate bias, often do not ask questions where the responses can be used for improvement, and are hard to make sense of without some training. Third, you will get a great sense of satisfaction by documenting your thinking and progress in improving your teaching. Lastly, simply the process of thinking through what kind of information will tell you that you are improving learning for your students, researching or experimenting with ways to improve learning, and reflection will likely in and of itself improve your teaching. It is a developmental process.
The differences between a Developmental and a Promotional Portfolio
| Developmental | Promotional |
| Provides a broad perspective on educational activities and achievements to aid in REFLECTION and IMPROVEMENT of over time | Highlights, showcases, and summarizes key educational achievements for promotion |
| Helps career planning by giving insight into where your strength and passion lie | Assists in attaining visibility and recognition among peers, leaders and/or administrators |
| Serves as a communication tool with mentors, advisors, department chairs, deans | Reflections show growth over time with evidence to support it |
| Provides organized, written, SPECIFIC information on which to build the Promotional Portfolio |
Common Teaching Portfolio Components –
Select materials so that your portfolio tells a story
- Teaching philosophy The basis of this story is a reflective teaching statement that describes your philosophy, strategies, and objectives for teaching and learning.
- Teaching activities The materials you select to include should reflect your philosophy and your experience. This data should reflect the range of teaching environments, including undergraduate, graduate or professional courses as well as student advising. Some of the types of documentation you might include are:
- Numbers (courses, students, advisees)
- Course descriptions
- Syllabi
- A list of assignments with samples
- Assessment tools
- Activities (including projects, exams)
- Innovation examples
- Video tapes the demonstrate (if possible)
- Evidence of teaching effectiveness
- Summary of student evaluations, including a reflective statement on the results
- Some examples of student comments, summarized with a reflection
- Peer reviewer comments
- Letters from a department chair, course coordinators
- Any unsolicited materials (emails or notes you received)
- Material demonstrating student learning
- Pre/post scores
- Standardized test scores
- Sample labs that include your feedback
- Sample of best or poorest work that includes your feedback
- Sample written work that includes your feedback
- Activities to improve instruction
- Workshops, seminars, institutes, professional meetings
- New courses designed (including collaborative or interdisciplinary) with reflection on your approach to co-teaching
- New methods you use in teaching and assessment
- Instructional improvement projects, including teaching grants
- Other: And depending on how you use them, you might add these:
- Contributions to teaching profession / institution
- Papers delivered on teaching
- Reviews
- Service to teaching committees
- Mentoring of colleagues
- Curriculum revision work
- Honors / awards
See Also
ePortfolios for Teaching & Learning (Teaching@ Tufts)
The Teaching Portfolio (CRLT Occasional Paper)
Teaching Portfolio (Vanderbilt)