Preparing Your Teaching Statement and Portfolio

The Teaching Statement is your opportunity to say that you like to teach, and are good at it, in your own words.

The Teaching Portfolio is your opportunity to back up your words with facts. We quote from the University of Washington portfolio site:

"Developing a Teaching Portfolio provides instructors with a powerful means to document their teaching practices, philosophies, and performances. A living document, the teaching portfolio serves as a guidepost showing where a teacher has been and has still yet to go.

Teaching portfolios can help you reflect on your teaching and examine the development of your teaching over time, and can also be used to represent your teaching to others as you apply for jobs, grants, awards, or promotion and tenure."

Enough said. Well, also read what happened when Phil pulled out his Teaching Portfolio at his job interviews. The AMS Notices article "Interviewing for a Job in Academia" by four former graduate students in Math also discusses the effectiveness of the Teaching Portfolio.

 

The Teaching Statement

Your Teaching Statement should convey to the reader that you like to teach, that you are reasonably good at it, and perhaps justify these claims with some facts if you have them (like winning a TA Teaching Prize, or getting some excellent student evaluations from your classes.) The problem is that some things are obviously expected in a Teaching Statement, such as:

  • You believe that all students have the capability to learn;
  • You enjoy watching the signs of recognition in the eyes of your students when an explanation goes over just right;
  • You take special care to prepare your lectures so that they address the problems the students are confronting;
  • You spend your weekends grading homework papers so that you get a "real feel" for your students' progress;
  • You enjoy enriching the usual curriculum with special examples that bring home the fundamental points of the core material.

No need to go on, and possibly you agree with some of these statements, but you need to say in your own words why they would be lucky to hire you as a teacher for their students. Plus, you get to show that you have thought some about teaching as well.

Your Teaching Statement also should include some examples of courses you have taught. For example, if you have taught your own class, like Math 210, then include this, along with some comment on the course evaluations, assuming they were at least decent. You do not need to list every course you were a grader for though, or every class you TA'd in general. Giving some selected examples of your teaching activities would seem more effective than listing too much, about which you can offer little substance.

The AMS Academic Job Search page has a long discussion of writing your Teaching Statement. We quote from part:

The teaching statement is often more difficult for a student to write. This seems to be true for a number of reasons: one is that we are often told that we are to write a teaching philosophy rather than a teaching statement. Another reason is that when we begin teaching, we often feel that we are just picking up a book and working problems. A third related point is that the motivation we have for teaching is not always well thought out: "I'm here mainly to be a graduate student. I'm doing recitations because I need the fellowship."

In light of the above, let's try to construct a teaching statement. First, because it's easier to write a statement than a philosophy, let's start with "I began teaching in 1993" rather than "Teaching is love and caring." Read the rest here.

Also, check out the article entitled "Writing a Teaching Philosophy Statement" by Helen Grundman in the December 2006 Notices of the AMS.

And as always, Good Luck!
 

The Teaching Portfolio

The purpose of the Teaching Portfolio is to "document your teaching practices, philosophies, and performances". For example, it might include:

  1. List of classes for which you have been a TA, and perhaps your duties.

  2. List of classes you have actually taught, if any.

  3. Copies of course handouts, syllabi, review sheets, quizzes, and tests (in LaTeX one hopes) that you may have prepared for your classes.

  4. Instructor evaluations of your teaching each term. (If you did not receive a copy of this evaluation, ask the course Instructor if they still have a copy and to make a xerox for you. In general, it is best to gather this information at the end of each semester.)

  5. Student evaluations of your teaching each term. (These may be requested for each section you teach from the "Teaching and Learning Center" in 102 Douglas Hall. Check here for more details.

  6. Any email feedback you have received on your teaching from students. Hopefully, this is positive, but why not include all the comments, so that later in life, you can look back and realize how much better as a teacher you have become. Or maybe, how critical the students at UIC were of your teaching, etc. 

  7. Any other recognitions of your teaching ability, or information you think would help document  your skill as a teacher.

The web sites below give more ideas for preparing your Teaching Portfolio.

One good idea is to get a ring binder folder, and put all of your Teaching Portfolio materials in it, so they stay organized. Plus, the Teaching Portfolio is a "Living Document" that you add to at the completion of each term, so a binder is an excellent way to store the documents.

Also, if you have a lot of electronic documents, like TeX files for quizzes and handouts, or emails concerning your teaching from students, then cut a CD with them for safe storage, or print out copies of the key documents. Do this after each semester - don't trust the math servers to keep your stuff safe forever; plus, you will want copies of these after you graduate and move on from UIC.

 

Web Resources of Teaching Portfolios

A google.com web search on Teaching Portfolio currently returns 114,000 hits! Here are a few sites to browse:
 

October 14, 2009 - Return to home