Teaching Portfolio
Overview
We will formally review your work as a teacher in the spring semester of your second year in the TWP. If this review is positive, we will extend the length of your contract from three years to five. We will base our review on a Teaching Portfolio in which you document and reflect upon the work you are doing as a teacher of academic writing. You will need to start collecting the materials for this Portfolio during your first semester with the TWP. These Guidelines provide an outline and schedule to follow as you do so.
In grounding our review on the materials in your Teaching Portfolio, our aim is both to recognize the intellectual complexity and difficulty of teaching writing, and to offer you a strong voice in setting the terms on which your work will be evaluated. We will ask you to archive your teaching materials online every semester, and then to compile a curated selection of those materials in a binder or disk for your second-year review. We hope that archiving your materials regularly will render the work of preparing your portfolio more manageable, as well as allow you quick access to those materials for other job searches.
The idea behind a portfolio is to provide a multi-perspectival view of your work as a teacher of academic writing. Your portfolio should include both texts that you have composed as a teacher (syllabi, assignments, handouts, comments on student writing, etc.) and that students have produced in your courses (drafts, revisions, web postings, slides, etc.). It should also include comments on your teaching from students (in course evaluations and through any other materials), from colleagues (in letters from class visits), and from you (in reflective essays and annotations).
Although the primary focus of the portfolio is your work as a teacher, we invite you to use this opportunity as another exercise in translation. When you joined the TWP, we asked you to shape your scholarly interests into a writing course. In essence, this meant identifying aspects of your disciplinary perspective and re-presenting it in terms of teachable writerly moves and practices. Now, as you prepare a teaching portfolio, we propose that you engage in a different kind of translation – one that reframes the work you do as a teacher of writing in ways that would be meaningful to fellow scholars in your field and future employers.
Materials Required for your Second-Year Review
At the time of your formal review, the final version of your Teaching Portfolio should contain documents in the following five categories.
(1) Course Materials
The key documents from each of your courses—including syllabi, sequences of assignments, schedules, important handouts, and other materials—that characterize the project of your course and document your plan of work for the semester.
(2) Student Writing and Responses
We are interested in the uses that students make of the materials you offer them, and in the ways you help students work with them. Please provide a small sample (~2/per semester) of examples of student essays, notebooks, journals, blogs, or other work from your courses – in either draft or revised form (or both). Please include examples of how you respond to this work – either in formative responses towards revision or grades – and of how you might help your students to review the work of their peers.
(3) Class Visits
We ask that you to invite at least one senior full-time faculty member in the TWP to visit your classroom each semester. Please note: In your first year, these visits must include the Director of First-Year Writing and the Director of Assessment and Professional Development, one each semester. Please use the TWP Classroom Visit Reflection to document this visit and the conversation that follows. We also ask you to visit at least two classes taught by your colleagues during each semester that you teach in the TWP, and strongly encourage you to invite other Fellows to visit your class. If these visits prompt a letter of support for your work, please include it. All class visits should be recorded on the Class Visit Log, found in the Second-Year Review Blackboard site. While we do not ask you to report on the content of each class visit, we do ask you to draw on these experiences in your end-of-semester reflective essay. We would like to know how these mutual visits and/or the conversations they inspired may have impacted your teaching thus far or your plans for future courses.
(4) Student Course Evaluations
Please include copies of the summary reports of the Trinity College Course Evaluation forms for each section of each course you teach. If you make use of any other forms of student evaluation, please feel free to include them as well.
(5) Reflective Essays
We ask you to post a brief (750-1000 words) reflective essay on your work in Writing 101 (20) at the end of each of your first two semesters in the TWP. Early in your fourth semester, we ask you to write a somewhat longer (about 2000 words) essay in which you review the materials you have collected in your Portfolio to that date, and assess the strengths and limits of your work as a teacher of academic writing, as well as sketch out a plan for future work in the TWP and beyond. All reflective essays should address in some capacity your course materials, student work, and your class visits. You are also welcome to use these essays as an opportunity to translate the work you are doing in the TWP into more discipline-specific terms.
(6) Other (optional)
Feel free to include any other materials – a WID syllabus, a book prospectus submitted, articles published – that would help us get a better sense of your work as a scholar. We hope that encouraging you to include these materials will help you keep in mind your scholarly pursuits, even as you develop as a teacher of writing.
Schedule for Posting Materials to the Second-Year Review Blackboard Site
As you collect the materials for your Teaching Portfolio over the next three semesters, we ask you to post them to your folder located on the TWP Second Year Review website. (Go to Blackboard and click on Organizations.) This is a secure, password-protected server space that can only be accessed by you and TWP administrators. In posting your materials, please follow the schedule below:
Year One
Fall Semester (due January 15)
Course materials
Course evaluations
Class visit reflection
Brief reflective essay
Student work with comments and revision
Log of class visits to/from colleagues
Spring Semester (due May 15)
Course materials
Course evaluations
Class visit reflection
Student work with comments and revision
Brief reflective essay
Log of class visits to/from colleagues
Year Two
Please provide to the TWP Business Manager, no later than December 31, the following two items, which are required by this deadline in order for you to be reviewed:
· proof that you have earned the PhD
· a copy of your updated CV
This is a firm deadline. Without proof of degree, the review will not proceed and your contract will not be extended beyond the initial three years.
Fall Semester (due January 15)
Course materials
Course evaluations
Class visit reflection
Student work with comments and revision
Log of class visits to/from colleagues
Other supporting materials
Submitting your Portfolio for Review
Spring Semester (due February 15)
Please submit, no later than February 15, a binder (or disk) containing your curated portfolio. It should include the following items:
· Course Materials
· Summary of Course Evaluations
· Class visit reflections
· Student work with comments and revision
· An updated CV
· Longer Reflective Essay
· Other Supporting Materials (optional)
The review committee, comprised of TWP program directors, will render decisions before Spring break and schedule a debriefing session in late April.
Curating your Portfolio
As you prepare the final version of your portfolio, please include commentary, reflections or annotations that will highlight aspects of the materials you would like the committee to notice. Feel free to organize the portfolio into different sections, include introductions to each section, color-code your materials, or otherwise structure your portfolio in a way that is readable. (We have found annotated comments particularly useful guides to the Student work section.)