46 Building your teaching portfolio
Having a well-filed collection of data relating to your teaching is a good start
towards assembling your actual teaching portfolio. The danger is that analysing
it and putting it all together seems like an enormous task, and tends not to get
started! The following suggestions should help you to make the task of building
your portfolio more straightforward, as a step-by-step process.
1 Decide on the physical form of your portfolio. For example, you may
decide to use a ring binder or lever-arch file. Such formats make it much
easier to adjust the contents of your portfolio, or to rearrange the order in
which you present sections. They also allow you to use punched, plastic
wallets to collect together samples of papers such as feedback
questionnaires, marked learner work, and so on.
2 Be really clear about primary data and secondary data. For the purposes
of your portfolio, it is worth defining primary data as the reflective bits that
you write about your own teaching, and secondary data as the backup for
your claims and comments in your primary data. Much of the material that
you have systematically filed will be the source from which you select your
secondary data, while the primary data will largely be written as you start to
work on the portfolio itself.
3 Turn your secondary data into appendices. Each of these will contain
selected examples of data about your teaching. Separate appendices could
contain respectively such things as handouts, lists of intended learning
outcomes, examples of your feedback to learners, examples of feedback to
you from learners, examples of assessed tasks that you have designed and
used, and so on. Be very selective regarding the data you include in these
appendices. It is much better that the appendices collectively cover a wide
range of different data, than many examples of one kind of data.
4 Make a draft index. Decide in which order you wish to present data and
reflections. There is no ‘right’ order; it will depend on the nature of your
work, and the range of data you wish to present. It is, however, very useful
to have this order sorted out in your mind before you start to put together the
‘front-end’ of your portfolio, in other words, your reflections and
commentaries arising from your secondary data.
5 Think of your target audience. Who is going to read your portfolio? More
importantly, who will perhaps make judgements on it? The people who are
most likely to look at it in detail are those whose responsibility includes
teaching quality.
6 Put TESOL into perspective. Those reading your portfolio for (for
example) promotion purposes may not be professionals in the area of
TESOL. In such cases, it could be useful to include, near the start of your
portfolio, an element which explains (very concisely, and without TESOL500 TIPS FOR TESOL 87