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How to Organize Your Teaching Portfolio

how to organize your teaching portfolio

A teaching portfolio is a large and well-organized binder that holds all of your important and relevant documents and evidence of your best teaching work.

If used correctly, your portfolio is an important tool in your job search as it allows schools to see snapshots of your past teaching work, credentials, and planning skills. Find out how to organize your teaching portfolio to best highlight your experience, credentials skills.

For years a teaching portfolio has been used as your record-keeping binder to keep all of your important teaching papers and artifacts. The second use for it is as a presentation tool for when you have teacher interviews.

This is when you will take your teaching portfolio with you to show evidence of what you have done in the classroom, such as photos from your best lessons, your classroom set-up, lesson plans, teaching resources you’ve created, letters you’ve sent to parents, assessments, and rubrics you’ve designed.

 Teaching Portfolios Can Include:

1. Table of Contents:

– This makes the portfolio look more professional and helps to organize it both for you and your readers

2. Essential Paperwork:

Targeted resume and cover letter

– List of your professional and personal references

– Copy of your teaching credentials and other qualifications

– Letters of recommendation from past principals, professors, and colleagues

– Relevant awards or certificate you’ve earned or received

– Publications or professional presentations

– Including a philosophy of education statement to show your beliefs and views about education and learning it’s similar to a mission statement. Spend time creating this and be familiar with its contents because it clarifies and synthesizes your thoughts into a coherent, organized message.

If you know why you want to be a teacher and what teaching means to you, it will be easier to answer interview questions confidently.

3. Lesson plans:

– Include three or four strong lesson plans geared toward the teaching position for which you are applying.

– Lesson plan evaluation forms and observations.

– Be sure to type them and that they contain the state or local education standards. When asked during an interview about teaching to state standards, you can then pull out your example lesson plans and show them.

4. Evidence of teaching experience:

– Samples of students’ work

– Photographs of the classroom and students actively working during successful lessons

– Evidence of lessons taught – particularly those that show evidence of accommodating diverse learners and different learning styles.

If you develop your teaching portfolio with all of these elements present, you will create an invaluable marketing tool to assist you during interviews.

 

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