Teaching portfolios are large documents used majorly for academic job applications and promotion. They serve as collections for everything surrounding your teaching, including teaching statements, diversity statements, syllabi, activities, lesson plans, teaching evaluations, course descriptions, and fourth wall-breaking justifications or explanations for pedagogical choices. This daunting list can create some anxieties about where to start, but I find it helpful to break up the list into manageable sections.
Try creating an online checklist to help you space out the creation of your teaching portfolio. Don’t take on all the items at once—instead, find ports for yourself in the storm, places where you feel at a confident stopping place. At each port, refuel, hold a parrot, take a break, and decide on where your journey should take you next. The timing of some of those stops will align with your semester—when you have completed a new assignment and have data about student success on it, or when you get course evaluations at the end of the semester.
(Might I also recommend making your checklist into a pirate map? Creating unconventional task lists can help when you’re feeling stagnant with a traditional to-do list.)
If you have any questions or would like to schedule a consultation with me to review your teaching portfolios, please email me at citlgrad@iu.edu.
If you are a graduate student or postdoc interested in learning more about teaching portfolios, please consider attending CITL’s “Creating a Teaching Portfolio (for graduate students and postdocs)” workshop on March 26.
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