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.
• Preparing the Teaching Portfolio, from Rick Reis' "Tomorrow's Professor" Mailing List. This article looks at what it takes to get buy-in for the teaching portfolio from professors and administrators.
• Making Teaching and Learning Visible, from Rick Reis' "Tomorrow's Professor" Mailing List. 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, 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. 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 geoscientists

• Andrew Zimmerman, Department of Geological Sciences, University of Florida
• Patrice Rey, School of Geosciences, University of Sydney (Australia)
• Stephen Pekar, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Queens College
• Michael N. Evans, Department of Geology and Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of Maryland