VI. Analyzing and Improving Your Teaching

Teaching Portfolios

Conversation over lunch at the August Teaching Workshop, Old Cabell Hall.

Much of the documentation you gather in the activities explained above will be useful evidence in a teaching portfolio. Teaching portfolios are used for a number of different purposes:

• To allow you to reflect analytically upon your teaching
  
• To help you improve your teaching through a process of self-analysis and reconsideration
• To organize documents pertinent to teaching that you can mine later for grant applications or award nominations
  
• To document your effectiveness as a teacher
  
• To help you strengthen the relationship between your teaching and research
  
• To organize evidence of your professional expertise
  
  

Rather like the professional portfolio of an artist, composer or writer, the teaching portfolio shows the person's best work, and perhaps argues for better work to come.

—Robert Bruner, Darden

To create a teaching portfolio, you select, analyze, and comment on documents that demonstrate your teaching of your discipline. The brief narrative statement includes your reflections on teaching, summaries of what and how you teach, efforts toward improvement, and evidence of teaching effectiveness. Evidence supporting assertions appears in appendices or web links: for example, syllabi, students' work presented anonymously (perhaps with your remarks or grades), students' comments, a videotaped class, colleagues' observation comments.
Although you can certainly create a teaching portfolio on your own (see Seldin, 1997 and Edgerton et al., 1991), many U.Va. faculty and TA colleagues recommend participating in the annual TRC workshop because it offers individualized coaching, support from colleagues writing their portfolios, and wide-ranging interdisciplinary conversations about teaching ideas. Whether you plan to create a portfolio or not, think about what constitutes products of good teaching as you go about your teaching. You can quickly gather some of the information that you will find invaluable in analyzing or presenting your teaching. For ideas about what to collect, contact the Teaching Resource Center.

Writing a portfolio, I learned how to contextualize the values and philosophies, my style and methods of teaching, and my concerns in a healthy and positive way.

 —Anonymous comment,
                                                                   participant in TRC Workshop on
                                                                   Teaching Portfolios, 1999