Components of an Effective Portfolio
To create a Teaching Portfolio that showcases your skills, talents and professional development, start collecting documents that serve as Evidence of teaching experience and abilities and write Reflections on each piece of evidence to demonstrate how you are learning from your experiences and growing in your skills as a teacher.
This is articulated by Rodriguez-Farrar (2006) in the article "The Teaching Portfolio: A Handbook for Faculty, Teaching Assistants and Teaching Fellows"[PDF].
An effective teaching portfolio will be selective, organized and representative of the breadth of your teaching experiences. For more on this topic, visit the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching.
To document teaching effectiveness, select documents that will demonstrate your range of experiences and highlight your skills. You might include these kinds of items in your collection:
- Lessons (e.g. PowerPoints saved as a PDF, Instructions for Assignments)
- Reflective statements on those lessons as well as revisions
- Evidence of attendance at pedagogy workshops (departmental, professional meetings or conferences)
- Mentoring, volunteer or leadership activities
- Statements from supervisors
- Positive emails from students about your course
- Feedback and evaluation forms
- Course syllabus
- Teaching Philosophy
Additional information on documenting teaching effectiveness is available from each of these websites: