Tutoring and Demonstrating - Creating a Teaching Portfolio
EXCERPT FROM
Tutoring and Demonstrating
A guide for the University of Melbourne
Richard James & Gabrielle Baldwin
Centre for the Study of Higher Education
The University of Melbourne, Australia,
1997 |
Creating a Teaching Portfolio
All people who tutor or demonstrate are strongly advised to develop a portfolio that describes their teaching experience and documents their achievements and effectiveness. Experience gained while tutoring or demonstrating at the University of Melbourne can make a significant contribution to the personal and professional development of graduate students, in skills of presentation, leadership, group management, time management and other areas. Whatever career you wish to pursue, documentation of your teaching activities and achievements may at some stage come in handy.
If you are pursuing an academic career, the importance of doing research, winning grants, and publishing is well known. Your qualities and capacity as a teacher also figure highly. Teaching in tutorials or practical classes is an especially valuable apprenticeship for later academic teaching, and you should aim to keep a continual record of the scope and quality of your teaching, and of your development as a teacher in higher education.
What records should you keep? First, you might keep a simple list of the classes taught (including the year level and numbers of students) and the style of teaching expected of you. Secondly and more importantly, you should consider documenting the quality of your work: how you have made yourself available to students; how you have provided students with feedback; and how you have encouraged student participation. Finally, as your experience grows you will find that you need to record your influence on your department: your contribution to course development; how you have helped address learning problems; the assistance you have provided to colleagues; and teaching innovations with which you have been associated. The findings of student evaluation and the steps taken to remedy any problems should also be recorded. Student outcomes and achievement are also a good source of evidence.
As the portfolio grows you will need to give careful thought to how the material is organised. There are no conventions for presenting a teaching portfolio, as there are for presenting academic research and publications. The way in which you present and substantiate an argument about your philosophy of teaching, your approaches to teaching, and your achievements and effectiveness may be very important if you are applying for a position, tenure or promotion, or preparing a report for an annual review. You should seek advice on the format for presentation.
It is much easier to accumulate a record of your teaching gradually, as you go, rather than to reconstruct it later - as people who have tried to reassemble their teaching careers overnight will attest. Make a habit of opening a file on your word processor and regularly adding notes on your teaching. Keep a box of relevant documents; it will be handy for providing evidence of your claims. You may never use all this information directly, but you will certainly draw on it in preparing applications.
Presenting your research
Professional development opportunities
Conditions of employment
Next chapter: Chapter 10. a guide for self-evaluation
Return to contents page
|
top of page
