Developing a portfolio of your teaching achievements
Read through the following strategies for presenting a summary of your teaching adapted from Hillier (2012). Think about how you might use or adapt these ideas to summarize your achievements in applying for consideration for a promotion or for inclusion in your teaching portfolio.
Write a short statement about what educational values matter to you and why. This might develop over time as you teach in different contexts and gain more experience and expertise. For example:
‘It is important that students get a sense of the history of the subject/vocational area they are studying, the current thinking and practice in the subject/vocational area, as well as a sense of possibilities in the future direction of the subject/vocational area.’
‘In my teaching I try to bring the subject/vocational area alive and generate an interest in and a passion for its study. Student participation and creative interactivity are the key to igniting this passion and interest.’
‘My current professional development priority is to capture the educational potential of new technologies.’
Maintain up-to-date records of your teaching, course reviews, student feedback from evaluations and how you have responded, projects, initiatives or innovations you have led/managed. Include numbers of students taught, teaching methods, and resources you have adapted or developed and used, comment on how you ensure that your subject specialist knowledge, knowledge of teaching and how you check that the content of the curriculum is up to date and how you keep abreast of developments in your subject/vocational area by engaging in research, subscribing to professional journals, and so on.
You might also include how you adopt a student-centred approach in your teaching, how you develop positive professional relationships with your students, examples of how you have helped a student in difficulty through to successful achievement, examples of your students’ accomplishments on completing their studies, how you help students from diverse cultural backgrounds to feel valued and included your classes/workshops, and how you use formative and summative feedback to students to enable them to reach their full potential.
In addition, you might demonstrate your commitment to research and scholarship in your subject-specialist discipline/vocational area or in the field of education by listing examples of how your teaching has been influenced by your own research or the research of others, including examples of formal feedback and recognition you have received from your peers, together with the impact of your engagement with research upon your students’ learning. You might mention conferences or courses you have attended, books or articles you have read. Describe how you use technology in your teaching and the impact of this upon the learning of your students and their subsequent achievements. Keep a record of any indicators of national, regional or local indicators of esteem in the form of any invitations you have received to speak about teaching, learning and research at conferences, workshops and seminars.
Describe any innovations you have made in your teaching, funding grants you have received and any awards you or your students have won. Document any influence you have had on institutional, departmental or team decisions and policies.
Present your documentary evidence as a narrative/supporting statement on your CV and/or application form, which tells the story of your teaching and its development and provides convincing, coherent and compelling evidence to support the points you make.
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