The Faculty Center

Documenting Teaching

A teaching portfolio is a factual description of a professor’s teaching strengths and accomplishments. ‘Teaching’ includes all activities that support student learning, including one-on-one student-teacher interactions and advising. The portfolio provides evaluators with concrete information on what individual faculty members do as teachers, why they do it, and how they do it, and provides evidence of those activities in student learning.

A teaching portfolio can be formative, supporting your growth and development as an educator, or summative, used in reappointment and promotion to demonstrate teaching effectiveness. While there are varieties of format, an effective portfolio should be well-documented and well organized. 

A teaching portfolio allows you to:

• Reflect deeply on your teaching practice
• Clarify and refine teaching and learning practices
• Focus on the teaching and learning process
• Model reflective practices for students
• Deepen your approaches to teaching and learning
• Provide context for your teaching

In preparation for work on your teaching portfolio, consider:

• Why do I teach?
• How do I teach?
• How do I know students are learning?

Teaching portfolios typically include the following:

1. Teaching philosophy
2. Teaching objectives, strategies and methodologies.
3. Teaching responsibilities which includes a list of courses provided by your college, course titles, average enrollments, an indication of whether the course is undergraduate or graduate, required or elective, role of your courses in the program or school.
4. Description of teaching materials (syllabi, handouts, assignments)
5. New instructional initiatives and curricular revisions
6. Formal and informal efforts to improve teaching, e.g., workshops, readings, conferences, conversations with colleague who has taught a similar course
7. Formative course assessments, e.g., feedback sought from students about a course/instructional effectiveness
8. Student ratings/formal course evaluations
9. Evidence of student learning
10. Teaching goals (short and long term)
11. Appendices (materials that provide evidence that support the preceding narrative    sections). 

Prompts for thinking about the teaching narrative