Portfolio Preparation Guidelines

Preparing a teaching portfolio is not only an excellent way to catalog and contextualize your accomplishments but the process also can be a rewarding and valuable professional development experience. The portfolio guidelines described here, developed by the University Teaching Council and informed by the literature on teaching portfolios, are intended to assist instructors in accomplishing both goals.

Overview

The portfolio content requirements are designed to provide you with an opportunity to describe and contextualize your teaching record as well as to articulate your commitment to teaching excellence in your academic career. The portfolio includes elements that provide opportunities to describe your evolution as a teacher who merits consideration as an award recipient. It also provides an opportunity to for you to display your strengths as an educator in a broad range of instruction-related activities.

Portfolio contents

You are asked to articulate your philosophy, record, development, and plans for ongoing development, etc., in brief essays, focusing mostly on your experiences and development at Illinois State University. The length limit requires you to be concise and selective about what you choose to address. Essays should highlight aspects of your teaching record that you believe are most important for an accurate portrayal of your record.

Brief biography

Beginning in 2024, we ask that you also include a brief biography (300 words max) in a separate electronic document. The biographies of honorees selected by the University Teaching Council will be used publicize honorees in advance of the University Teaching & Learning Symposium in January. The biography is not used in evaluating nominees, and thus, it should be a separate document and not included as a part of the essays produced for the portfolio itself.

General Guidance
Submissions

Do:

Make every effort to include something to reflect your work and development in every section, as the committee will consider all your efforts in all of these areas.

The Best Portfolios:

Recognize that this portfolio is all the committee has to go on to understand your philosophy, goals, choices, and actions as a teacher. As you compose your portfolio, be careful that the materials included are an accurate representation of you.
Carefully balance specific and concrete examples with your larger theoretical vision for your teaching.
Reflect close attention to how this portfolio represents you as a teacher and make sure your writing is clear.
Keep cohesion in mind as all of these elements will be reviewed together.
Remember that this document is about not only your existing pedagogy but how you have learned to be a teacher and how your pedagogy has developed over time and will continue to develop; thus, you can use this portfolio as a means of highlighting specific and important aspects of your journey though teaching.
Keep in mind that thoughtful reflection as articulated in this portfolio is a key to success.
Reference your included artifacts as appropriate in various narratives and explain why they are included and how they enhance your portfolio and the version of yourself as a teacher you’re composing throughout the portfolio.
For each artifact include a paragraph on a cover sheet to explain what it is and how it illustrates or illuminates an important component or theme.

Don’t:

Forget to proofread!
Let the material nature of your portfolio reflect a piece-meal construction.

All portfolios should be submitted electronically to the University Teaching Council. Upon submission to the University Teaching Council, portfolios must include the following combined in a single PDF:

Electronic copy of the official nomination form signed by the nominee’s Chair/Director and Dean
Electronic copy of the Chair/Director’s letter of support
All required essays compiled in an electronic document
Up to five artifacts
Electronic document with a biography of the nominee.

College offices are responsible for forwarding portfolio materials in electronic format to the Committee before the deadline.

Section 1: Contextualizing the Nominee’s Teaching Experiences

This section (up to 5 pages, single spaced) allows applicants the ability to contextualize their teaching experiences, so that the review committee understands unique considerations, specific teaching contexts for each applicant, and depth and breadth of experience and expertise. Three components are required for this section.

Teaching Philosophy Statement
Summary of courses, independent studies, mentoring of/with students/peers, etc.
Chair’s letter as an introduction to the applicant

Aligned with the FITE, up to 2 pages, single spaced

This is where you identify your foundational beliefs about teaching and learning and explain how you implement those beliefs into your instructional activities. The best Teaching Philosophy Statements articulate teaching philosophies that reflect significant time and effort to develop and refine and articulate the instructor’s fundamental approaches to teaching. Also, the best teaching philosophies are reflected throughout the rest of the elements that make up the portfolio and present the instructor’s approaches to teaching and ongoing development as a professional.

Do:

Identify your foundational beliefs about teaching and learning.
Explain how you implement your beliefs about teaching and learning through your instructional activities.
Include attention to the ways in which your teaching is culturally responsive

The Best Portfolios:

Carefully pair beliefs about teaching with examples that illustrate how these beliefs are manifested in the classroom.
Incorporate this philosophy into other materials within the portfolio—like curriculum development, teaching challenge, artifacts, etc.
Are conscious of the ways in which a teaching philosophy is always in flux and illustrate that evolution through carefully chosen examples.
Consider the way in which narrative might help; telling a story can be effective.
Demonstrate thought about whether this philosophy stems from a particular experience, scholarly stance, or reading. Strategic quotations or references to scholars can be effective.
Carefully consider the use of headings that may effectively organize the document.
Distill ideas into a few central components to be explored thoroughly.
Describe an ideal version of your classroom and philosophy, suggest ways in which you try to approximate this ideal in the reality of your classroom and articulate your hopes for the future.
Cohesively express not only the nuances of this philosophy but how these beliefs are enacted through assignments, class projects, and course design.

Don’t:

Forget to include examples that illustrate your philosophy and beliefs in action.
Spend time on elements that don’t tie together into a cohesive picture of you as a teacher.
Try to do too much.

1 page to contextualize teaching experiences

This narrative should cover up to the last five years and describe the following (when part of your record):

Courses taught–including dates, titles, and number of students for each–as well as a brief explanation of the context of the course in department curriculum (e.g., requirement or elective).
Additional instructional activities with students—including descriptions of activities such as guest speaker appearances for colleagues’ classes, non-class instruction such as independent studies and honors projects, thesis/dissertation advising (chair and committee membership), and co-curricular teaching-related service.
Instruction-related activities with university colleagues—including descriptions of collegial instruction such as mentoring, participation in teaching-learning communities, and participation in departmental or campus teaching development activities and events.
Instruction-related activities with non-university colleagues.

1 - 2 pages

A letter of support from the department chair or school director should introduce the nominee to the University Teaching Council. As such, it will be a substantial letter that authoritatively addresses important elements of the nominee’s record based on the chair’s/director’s participation in reviewing annual productivity reports and other ASPT/evaluation activities. The letter should:

Include information about the courses the nominee teaches and the impact they have had in the classroom
Summarize the nominee’s commitment to creating inclusive and accommodating classrooms
Summarize the nominee’s teaching evaluation record, adding context where appropriate to convey students’ perceptions of the nominee’s efficacy in areas such as innovation, communication, and/or meeting pedagogical challenges.
Summarize the nominee’s curriculum development and instructional innovation activities, adding context where appropriate.
Provide a summary statement about what sets this candidate apart from other nominees.

Section 2: Using Evidence to Inform Teaching

Up to 4 pages, single-spaced, for this section.

How can the following experiences and/or artifacts be used to demonstrate teaching excellence? Applicants should share narratives and artifacts for one or several of the following to operationalize their teaching philosophy. Across award categories, nominees might have different experiences with evaluation and curriculum development. Nominees are strongly encouraged to select experiences from the list below that align with their instructional roles and duties within their department/school.

Various Evaluations
Overcoming a teaching challenge
Innovative teaching experiences
Curriculum development

These narratives should describe teaching evaluations over time to look for trends or changes, specifically focusing on the last three years. (Graduate Students may have fewer evaluations.)

Student evaluations

Summarize student evaluations for your courses. These evaluations may include end-of-semester course or teaching evaluations, results of midterm chats, or other midterm evaluations. Include information on the instrument(s) used. For evaluations that are not numerical, explain evaluation method used and summarize those evaluations. Contextualize the evaluations to help provide a more accurate interpretation.

Peer evaluations

Summarize any additional peer evaluations (formal or informal, formative or summative) such as peer observations, peer reviews of teaching materials, etc. Include frequency, format or procedure, instruments, information on the specific courses evaluated, the content of peer reviews, and the credentials of peer evaluators of your teaching. These could include observations by those who have visited your classes, reviews of course syllabi and materials, reviews of technology used in instruction such as web sites, etc.

Self-evaluations

Describe any self-evaluations you have completed. This can include narratives you have done as a part of annual productivity reports, analyses you have done while participating in teaching workshops at conferences or elsewhere, reflections based on reviewing video footage of yourself teaching either through the Center for Integrated Professional Development or independently, or other forms of self-evaluation. Summarize the key findings of your self-evaluations, including providing contextual information such as your motivation, your areas of focus and goals for each evaluation, and how you have used what you learned to improve your teaching.

Reflection on evaluations

Explain what you have learned from the accumulation of evaluations over time and from different perspectives, how those insights have shaped your teaching and you as a teacher, and how you will incorporate the insights into your future teaching.

Do:

Include summaries of the various types of evaluation that you utilize paired with contextual explanations and your reflections on these evaluations.

The Best Portfolios:

Curate the information selected to represent evaluations. This is not meant to be a place for a comprehensive compilation of student ratings of teaching.
Synthesize the information provided, including using tables if it is an efficient method for conveying data summaries.
Balance qualitative and quantitative data (if applicable) to describe evaluations.
Recognize that reflection is a key part of this process. Be conscious of providing a cohesive picture of your reflections as you compose these documents.
Focus on the ways in which other elements of the portfolio—teaching challenge, teaching philosophy, teaching development plan, etc.—are connected to both teaching evaluations reflections on these evaluations (e.g. I responded to this critique by doing X, which is detailed in section Y).
Remember that context matters. Information such as how many times you’ve taught the course, teaching load, number of students in the course, and all sorts of other factors contribute to the context of your evaluations.
Prioritize evaluations that are based on ISU teaching, but may include non-ISU evaluation data if there is a significant reason for inclusion.

Don’t:

Make this section solely about numbers.
Hesitate to include “negative” evaluations; these, along with positive evaluations, offer you something to reflect on.

Every teacher, including the best, has failures, crises, difficult situations, etc. The best teachers, however, are distinguished by how they handle and learn from these challenges. This is an opportunity for you to describe a challenge that you have faced as a teacher, how you handled it, what you learned from it, and how the experience shaped your teaching. It could be a single incident or a long-term issue, a temporary problem, or an ongoing difficulty.

Do:

Narrate a legitimate challenge.
Address your response(s) to that challenge over time.
Convey what you have learned as a teacher from this experience.
Keep in mind that good teaching challenges reflect learning you’ve done about your pedagogy.

The Best Portfolios:

Consider big picture issues within the teaching challenge. Ideas like implementing your teaching philosophy and building relationships with students and how those ideas connect to other nuts-and-bolts elements of teaching like technology use, classroom management, curriculum decisions, personal approaches to the classroom, assignments, etc., can work well here.
Balance the length of description of the teaching challenge against the explanation of what you’ve learned from it in a way that’s appropriate for your teaching challenge.
Remember that a good narration is a real story with 3 basic parts: 1) recognition of the issue; 2) cognitive engagement with the issue; 3) enacting change.
Use the challenge as a springboard to talk about pedagogical development. Explain what you learned from your challenge and how your response to it has affected your teaching.
Focus on one challenge or carefully select and frame multiple examples that are substantial enough for an in-depth discussion.
Connect the teaching challenge to other documents within the teaching portfolio (Artifacts, Teaching Philosophy, etc.).

Don’t:

Focus on a challenge that is common to most faculty (for example, the transition to online teaching).
Assume you have to have “solved” or “fixed” your teaching challenge to write effectively about it for the purposes of this element.
Create a piece-meal teaching challenge that attempts to tie multiple small issues together.
Cram in too many examples so that your discussion lacks depth and complexity.

This narrative should describe your activities implementing instructional innovations, including approaches and strategies as well as technologies, covering at least the last five years. It should describe specific strategies and/or technologies, the course(s) in which they were implemented, and your rationale/motivation/goals for the change. Include an evaluation and/or reflection of your activities’ contributions to student learning.

Do:

Narrate your process for implementing the innovation.
Address your response(s) or revisions to that innovation over time.
Convey what you have learned as a teacher from this experience.

The Best Portfolios:

Consider big picture issues within the teaching innovation. Ideas like implementing your teaching philosophy and building relationships with students and how those ideas connect to other nuts-and-bolts elements of teaching like technology use, classroom management, curriculum decisions, personal approaches to the classroom, assignments, etc., can work well here to describe innovations.
Carefully balance the length of description of the teaching innovation against the discussion of outcomes.
Remember that a good narration is a real story with 3 basic parts: 1) introduction of the innovation; 2) cognitive engagement with the issue; 3) description of outcome.
Use the innovation as a springboard to discuss how its implementation has impacted other areas of teaching.
Keep in mind that good teaching innovations demonstrate deliberate application of teaching philosophy and pedagogy; draw connections between intentions and outcomes.
Use carefully selected and framed examples that are substantial enough for an in-depth discussion.
Connect innovations to other documents within the teaching portfolio (Artifacts, Teaching Philosophy, etc.).

Don’t:

Assume your innovation has to involve a large number of students for the purposes of this element.
Envision innovations as only connecting to technology. Many do, but others employ civic engagement or other pedagogies that demonstrate new applications to share course content.
Provide a bulleted list of innovations without context or explanation.
Cram in too many examples so that your discussion lacks depth and complexity.

This narrative should describe your activities contributing to revised or new curriculum covering up to the last five years. It should describe (a) revisions to courses (rationale, specifics, evaluation of/reflections on revisions), (b) new course development (rationale, specifics of developed course(s), evaluation of/reflection on new course(s)), and (c) contributions to department/school/university curriculum development (e.g., formal participation in committees, informal contributions with peers) and reflection on the value of these contributions.

Do:

Describe your contributions to curriculum over time.
Address revisions to courses, new course developments, and contributions to department/school/university curriculum.
Include reflection on your curricular contributions.

The Best Portfolios:

Include both individual revisions to classes taught over time and/or more institutional-level changes.
Incorporate the rationale changes made or participated in over time.
Narrate the types of help received from others (colleagues, discipline-specific associations, students, etc.) and/or the types of help given to others during the process of curriculum development.
Focus on both formal and informal curriculum development.
Balance a discussion of the curricular changes enacted with a careful reflection on and/or rationale for those changes.
Represent curriculum development through the inclusion of Artifacts that are referenced in this section.

Don’t:

Assume you have nothing to report. As a thoughtful teacher nominated for a teaching award, you’ve certainly engaged in curriculum development even if it is not a new course. You can include informal course revisions, refining assignments, designing new methods of assessment, etc., as examples of curriculum development.

Section 3: Teaching Development Plan

Aligned with the FITE, 1 to 2 pages, single spaced

This is an opportunity to describe where you’ve been as a teacher (and why you were there), where you are now (and what you did to get here), and where you are going as a teacher (and specifically what you intend to do to get there).

Organizing your plan
Tips for success

Organization is up to you, but the plan should include specifics about teaching-related decisions and activities in the past and your plans for your future that describe your evolution as a teacher.

Your teaching development plan should align with the Framework for Inclusive Teaching Excellence (FITE), which is the signature pedagogy for Illinois State University that provides an evidence-informed framework for instructional design. In sum, your teaching development plan should provide a specific agenda for your ongoing development as a professional pursuing teaching excellence.

Do:

Briefly describe where you’ve been and where you are now; allocate the bulk of the essay to explaining where you’re going as a teacher.
Include specifics about your plans for the future and employ the FITE framework to present a specific agenda for your ongoing teaching development.

The Best Portfolios:

Pay close attention to organization and utilize either narrative (tell your story from beginning to end) or address key aspects of the present to discuss the future.
Emphasize the future. This future version of yourself as you develop your teaching is a key highlight of this document.
Include elements of teaching both inside and outside the classroom anchored in appropriate elements of the FITE.
Integrate ideas from other documents within the teaching portfolio (Artifacts, Teaching Philosophy, etc.).
Reflect on the past and present and use this reflection as a springboard for discussing future direction.
Are specific about both ideas and actions.

Don’t:

Feel that your plan needs to align with all components of the FITE, as some parts of the framework might match your future direction for teaching development better than others.
Be too literal in limiting yourself to actions only. This should be about what you aspire to do in your teaching and can, therefore, involve ideas and plans you will implement.
Be too grandiose. Your goals should stretch you as a teacher but still be achievable.
Be too ethereal or theoretical. While you’re working with what you’re hoping to do in the future, this should also be a roadmap for your professional development that is grounded in concrete ideas and practices.