We have just come to the end of another semester, and it can be both rewarding and useful to reflect on your Spring 2024 teaching and gather a few pieces of concrete evidence for your teaching portfolio. Proactively documenting your teaching will make it easier to produce materials for annual review, tenure and promotion processes, and teaching awards and recognitions. The process of regularly collecting and reflecting on evidence about your teaching is also a great way to help you make informed decisions about your teaching practices and identify impactful areas for revision in your courses.

There are many sources of useful information about your teaching (Brookfield, 2017; TEVal, n.d.). While student feedback in the form of an end-of-term student feedback survey report is often a necessary piece of a teaching portfolio, your portfolio and teaching practices will be enriched by collecting and reflecting on feedback and perspectives from multiple sources. Documenting your teaching every semester will help you create a narrative about your approach and practices over time.

Some possible sources of valuable information about your teaching include:

• Your peers. Colleagues can be a valuable source of inspiration and feedback for teaching. You may have been observed by a colleague or observed someone else’s classroom this semester: What did you learn from those experiences? Perhaps you learned something new during a hallway conversation with someone in your department—how did using that idea go? If you participated in a faculty learning community or community of practice, what did you learn that you were able to apply?
• Your own experiences, reflections, and artifacts. Try writing down a few bullet points about the things you tried this semester in your course, how you think it went, and why. If you tried a new syllabus design, a fresh assignment, a group learning activity, or something similar, what was the impact on student learning from your perspective, and how do you know? Why did you try those things in the first place? 
• Your students. Beyond the end-of-term student feedback survey reports or any midsemester feedback you may have gathered, you can also consider other evidence of how students learned in your course. How did they respond to assignments or perform on major assessments? What ideas did they share in class? Where did they express confusion or request additional assistance from you or your teaching assistants? The next time you teach you can plan to purposefully engage with your students’ perspectives about their learning by gathering midterm feedback.
• Scholarly conversation or input. Did you apply any evidence-based frameworks or ideas to your courses this year (e.g., backward course design, or transparent assignment design)? Did you engage with a research paper on teaching practice or attend an evidence-based teaching workshop that informed your decisions? Perhaps you are conducting a SoTL study on your course. Reflecting on the outcomes of these decisions can help you set goals for future interactions with scholarly support for teaching.

These are potential sources and examples of evidence. Your college and department will have guidance about what is expected for formal review processes, and it’s important to check in with trusted colleagues and campus leaders to make sure you are familiar with those conventions.

Before you leave for the summer, try identifying two pieces of evidence about your teaching approach and practices that are drawn from two of the above categories, and save it somewhere where you can find it later. This process might take as little as 10-15 minutes! The Center for Teaching is here to help you brainstorm about how to document your teaching and revise your teaching statement. Contact us at teaching@uiowa.edu.

If you would like to explore some evidence-based practices to set your teaching up for success next year, register for the Inclusive Syllabus Design Retreat or the Transparent Assignment Design Retreat this summer.

References:

Brookfield, S. (2017). Becoming a critically reflective teacher (2nd ed.). Jossey-bass.

Transforming higher education - multidimensional evaluation of teaching. TEval’s Tools for Evaluation. (n.d.). https://teval.net/index.php?tools_for_evaluation

TEval. (n.d.). Materials: Tools for Evaluation. Transforming higher education - multidimensional evaluation of teaching. https://teval.net/index.php?tools_for_evaluation