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The portfolio content requirements are designed to provide you with an opportunity to describe and contextualize your teaching record as well as to articulate your commitment to teaching excellence in your academic career. The portfolio includes elements that provide opportunities to describe your evolution as a teacher who merits consideration as an award winner. It also provides an opportunity to for you to display your strengths as an educator in a broad range of instruction-related activities.
Documentation requirements are reduced from prior years, with greater reliance on a letter from your chair to verify your record. However, you are asked to articulate your philosophy, record, development activities, and plans for ongoing development, etc., in brief (2 pages maximum) essays. The length limit requires you to be concise and selective about what you choose to address. Essays should highlight aspects of your teaching record that you believe are most important for an accurate and effective portrayal of your record.
Traditional printed or electronic portfolios are acceptable. Electronic portfolios should be in a widely accessible software format or web-based to facilitate evaluation review. They should also use the same organization as traditional portfolios, again to facilitate review.
Note that the various portfolio components listed below parallel those for the faculty-level portfolios. However, the shorter length of graduate students’ teaching records and differences among disciplines mean that graduate student portfolios likely will not include many of the components that would be relevant for a faculty member (e.g., #6: Curriculum Development, #7: Instructional Innovations, #8: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, #9: Instruction-Related Recognition). In those cases, simply insert a single page with the title of the section and the phrase “Nothing to report” in place of the essay. The list of contents that can be included in an application portfolio is followed by explanations of each item to guide portfolio preparation.
Table of Contents (1 page)
Use the list above as your table of contents (even if you do not have materials for each and every section) and to organize your portfolio so that reviewers can find your materials. For printed portfolios, using labeled dividers for each section will help evaluators find pertinent materials. For electronic portfolios, using those topics as primary links will similarly help evaluators find pertinent materials.
Teaching Philosophy Statement
Length: 2 pages maximum, single spaced
This is where you identify your foundational beliefs about teaching and learning and to explain how you implement those beliefs into your instructional activities.
Summary of Teaching Assignments and Teaching Development
Length: 2 pages maximum, single spaced
This narrative should describe the following (when part of your record). Listing some information (e.g., courses and # students) where it makes sense is acceptable.
Courses taught
Include dates, titles, and number of students for each as well as a brief explanation of the context of the course in department curriculum (e.g., requirement or elective).
Additional instructional activities with students
Include descriptions of activities such as guest speaker appearances for colleagues’ classes, non-class instruction such as independent studies and honors projects, and co-curricular teaching-related service.
Instruction-related activities with university colleagues
Include descriptions of collegial instruction including mentoring, participation in teaching-learning communities, and participation in departmental or campus teaching development activities and events.
Instruction-related activities with non-university colleagues
Summary and Contextualization of Teaching Evaluation Record
These narratives should describe teaching evaluations.
Student evaluations
Length: 2 pages maximum, single spaced
Summarize student evaluations for your courses. Include information on the instrument(s) used. If evaluations are not numerical, explain evaluation method used and summarize those evaluations. Contextualize the evaluations to help provide a more accurate interpretation.
Peer evaluations
Length: 2 pages maximum, single spaced
Summarize DFSC/CFSC evaluations based on your annual letters and any other communications. Summarize any additional peer evaluations (formal or informal, formative or summative), including frequency, format or procedure, instruments, information on the specific courses evaluated, the content of peer reviews, and the credentials of peer evaluators of your teaching. These could include observations by those who have visited your classes, reviews of course syllabi and materials, reviews of technology used in instruction such as web sites, etc.
Self-evaluations
Length: 2 pages maximum, single spaced
Describe any self-evaluations that you have completed. This can include narratives that you have done as a part of annual productivity reports, analyses that you have done while participating in teaching workshops at conferences or elsewhere, reflections based on reviewing video of yourself teaching either through CTLT or independently, or other forms of self-evaluation. Summarize the key findings of your self-evaluations, including providing contextual information such as your motivation, your areas of focus and goals for each evaluation, and how you have used what you learned to evolve your teaching.
Reflection on evaluations
Length: 2 pages maximum, single spaced
Explain what you have learned from the accumulation of evaluations over time and from different perspectives, how those insights have shaped your teaching and you as a teacher, and how you will incorporate the insights into your future teaching.
Reflection on Teaching Challenge
Length: 2 pages maximum, single spaced
Every teacher, including the best, has failures, crises, difficult situations, etc. The best teachers, however, are distinguished by how they handle and learn from these challenges. This is an opportunity for you to describe a challenge that you have faced as a teacher, how you handled it, what you learned from it, and how the experience shaped your teaching. It could be a single incident or a long-term issue, a temporary problem, or an ongoing difficulty. Choose one that best illustrates who you are as a teacher and how you have become the teacher that you are today.
Curriculum Development
Length: 2 pages maximum, single spaced
This narrative should describe your activities contributing to revised or new curriculum. It should describe (a) revisions to courses (rationale, specifics, evaluation of/reflections on revisions), (b) new course development (rationale, specifics of developed course(s), evaluation of/reflection on new course[s]), and (c) contributions to department/school/university curriculum development (e.g., formal participation in committees, informal contributions with peers) and reflection on the value of these contributions.
Instructional Innovations
Length: 2 pages maximum, single spaced
This narrative should describe your activities implementing instructional innovations, including approaches and strategies as well as technologies, covering the last five years (or less if your teaching career is less). It should describe specific strategies and/or technologies, the course(s) in which they were implemented, and your rationale/motivation/goals for the change. Include an evaluation and/or reflection of your activities’ contributions to student learning.
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Length: 2 pages maximum, single spaced
This narrative should describe your scholarship that focuses on teaching and learning. Detail completed projects, current projects, professional presentations at conferences and through publications, and projects in process. Explain how this work has influenced you as a teacher.
Instruction-Related Recognition
Length: 1 page maximum, single spaced
This narrative should describe recognition that you have received in your teaching career, such as awards and grants. For awards, identify and contextualize the source and explain the significance. For grants, identify and contextualize the source and explain the significance and the outcomes of the grant.
Teaching Development Plan
Length: 2 pages maximum, single spaced
This is an opportunity to describe where you’ve been as a teacher (and why you were there), where you are now (and what you did to get here), and where you are going as a teacher (and specifically what you intend to do to get there). Organization is up to you, but the plan should include specifics about teaching-related decisions and activities in the past and your plans for your future that describe your evolution as a teacher. As such, it should provide a specific agenda for your ongoing development as a professional pursuing teaching excellence.
Chair's/Supervisor's Letter of Support
A letter of support from the department chair or school director should provide documentation for details of the nominee’s record. As such, it will be a substantial letter that authoritatively addresses important elements of the nominee’s record based on the chair’s/director’s participation in reviewing annual productivity reports and other ASPT activities. The letter should:
Vita
Selected Artifacts
Nominees may include up to (but no more than) five artifacts or forms of documentation. The small number means that nominees must be selective about what they include, based on their judgment about which items best illustrate, illuminate, support, and reinforce their teaching record as described in the rest of the portfolio. Also effective are artifacts that demonstrate the effectiveness of your practices and activities by including information and evidence on student outcomes. The most effective artifacts will be those that are cited explicitly and contextualized in the essay(s) relevant to the artifact.
Artifacts can include forms of documentation typically included in a standard teaching portfolio, but can also include other items that nominees believe are important to understanding themselves as teachers. For example, if a nominee has articulated his or her success in course development activities in an essay, materials related to that effort are a possible artifact. If a nominee has articulated his or her emphasis on instructional innovations in an essay, materials related to that effort might be considered as one of the artifacts. Note: Nominees are required to obtain students’ permission to include student work in the portfolio and, when appropriate, to remove all identifying information from any student work.
