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last.updated 8.6.07

Teaching Portfolio

Purpose

The portfolio is a culmination of the work that you have done this semester. Many of the documents you compose throughout the semester can be placed in this teaching portfolio and can be used for employment purposes. Therefore, the purpose of the portfolio is to give you a leg up on putting together these professional documents.

The accompanying final statement is your opportunity to both reflect upon the work that you have done this semester and to explain to the instructor what you know about teaching composition in the language arts classroom–your understanding of praxis.

Instructions–Unit Portfolio

The Unit Portfolio will include...

• a compiled and revised Annotated Bibliography (revised final)
• the Teaching Philosophy (evaluated drafts and revised final)
• the Assignment Sheet (evaluated drafts and revised final)
• the Unit Plan with Rationale (evaluated drafts and revised final)
• the teaching materials for and evaluations of the Pedagogical Presentation
• the Final Statement
• any other documents that you find relevant to this corpus of texts

Organize these documents how you want them to be read and place them into a manila folder (or a self-addressed stamped manila envelope if you want the evaluated portfolio prior to next semester).

Instructions–Final Statement

Unlike many of the other documents you have produced this semester, the audience for this document is specifically the instructor. This document, serving the same purposes as a final, is your opportunity to demonstrate what you have learned over the course of the semester.

Rather than just reflecting on the entire semester by glossing over everything that we read and everything that you did, your responsibility for this assignment is to focus on a few issues and develop an in-depth discussion about how your pedagogy responds to the composition and language arts conversation about these issues. Use the following heuristics to merely gather the content for a strong, cohesive 1000-1500 word, single-spaced discussion:

• what is your pedagogical goals for the composition course that you developed? (go back to the freewriting that you did at the very beginning of the course and your syllabus rationale)
• what are two pedagogical issues that we discussed this semester that speak best to these goals? what have composition and/or langauge arts scholars said about these issues? (use the assigned readings, the readings that you did for the annotated bibliography, and any other relevant scholarship that you read)
• how does your pedagogy, including what you developed for the Assignment Sheet, reflect your position on these chosen issues? (use the pedagogical documents that you developed to exemplify the points that you are making)
• how might the practice of the pedagogy you developed contribute to the larger conversation about composition studies? (your response to this will probably draw upon everything above; you may also choose to use your experiences in the classroom to support your point, but not to the exclusion of engaging with the theoretical discussion)
• sources that you reference, should be cited using a MLA or APA format.

Make sure that your statement combines scholarship with specific references to the other documents in your portfolio

Criteria

The Teaching Portfolio is due on December 10, 2007 .

The Teaching Portfolio is a final grade and is worth 200 points. The instructor will determine your grade by evaluating how well the corpus of documents work together, rather than assigning a grade or point value to each document in the portfolio.

In addition to the general evaluation criteria, the instructor will be looking for evidence of...

• compliance with the criteria listed for each piece of the portfolio (see links above)
• cohesiveness among the portfolio documents
• a sense of audience–are the Teaching Philosophy and Unit Plan with rationale written to an administrative audience who may decide your employment status? Is the Assignment Sheet written for a student audience? Is the Final Statement written to the instructor?
• a neat, organized, easy to navigate portfolio
• an informed understanding of language arts curriculum theory and your ability to articulate this understanding
• your ability to support your Final Statement with useful examples from your documents and thoughtful analysis from the readings
• appropriate use of conventions throughout the portfolio, including MLA and APA citation formatting
• a teacherly persona