Documenting Your Teaching

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Students in Geology of the National Parks work together to estimate the rate of erosion of the Grand Canyon through geologic time. Photo courtesy of Carol Ormand.

Documenting your teaching can

• give you an advantage during interviews, where you can show your future colleagues that you not only have teaching experience, but that you have begun reflecting on and learning from that experience
• improve your teaching, through reflective practice
• provide evidence of your teaching strengths and accomplishments

If you have developed a teaching statement (sometimes called a teaching philosophy), you have already begun documenting your teaching.

Resources

Jump down to books and articles or example portfolios.

Books and articles

• The Teaching Portfolio, by Peter Seldin, describes the purposes and contents of teaching portfolios, and gives several examples from a wide range of disciplines, include geology.
• Making Teaching and Learning Visible, (more info) from Rick Reis' "Tomorrow's Professor" Mailing List. (more info) This article describes the uses of a course portfolio. A course portfolio focuses on just one course you teach. It can become a building block for a teaching portfolio, but developing it may be a more manageable task.
• Good Teachers Wanted, (more info) by Mary Morris Heiberger and Julia Miller Vick. This column, from the Chronicle of Higher Education, explores several kinds of documents you can collect to use as evidence of excellence in teaching. As the authors point out, these are exactly the kinds of items you would include in a teaching portfolio.
• Items For Inclusion in a Teaching Portfolio, a posting on Rick Reis' "Tomorrow's Professor" Mailing List. (more info) This extensive list of items you might include in your portfolio will give you lots of ideas, from which you can select the items most strongly illustrating your teaching strengths.

Example portfolios by geoscience faculty, postdocs, and graduate students

• Andrew Zimmerman, (more info) Department of Geological Sciences, University of Florida
• Thomas Hickson, ( This site may be offline. ) from when he was a post-doc at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, University of Minnesota (late 1990's).
• Ellen Herman, ( This site may be offline. ) Department of Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University