Portfolios

These days you need to have a beautiful, complete, and //clearly organized// ELECTRONIC teaching portfolio, published on the web. First, all schools are looking for teachers that know how to use technology well. Creating an interactive teaching web site that also serves as your portfolio is a basic requirement for teaching these days. You can present your portfolio as a web address, you can burn it on to a CD ROM or even a CD ROM calling card, and/or you can go to your interview with a laptop computer to show it off. See the following page on [|creating your teaching website] for further explanation and examples.

Rather than organizing your portfolio in the categories of the midterm and final evaluation of student teaching (as the College of Education recommends), organizing it to address the different strands of Language Arts teaching is also effective. You might have a section on "Teaching the Writing Process" (with subsections on "Prewriting," "Drafting," "Editing," "Publishing" and even "Teaching Grammar in Context"), on "Teaching Literature" (with subsections on "British Literature," "American Literature," "Multicultural Literature," "Poetry," "Thematic Approaches" etc.), "Speaking and Listening" and so on. Include sections on special interests relevant to English teaching, such as "Journalism," "Creative Writing," "Speech and Debate," "Yearbook," "Drama," "Family Life Education," "Business English," "Interdisciplinary Teaching with Social Studies and History," depending on your interests and background. You could have a section on "Classroom Management," "Classroom Climate," or "Positive Discipline." You could have a section on "Professional Activities" that foregrounds your membership in MCTE and NCTE (for middle school be sure to be a member of the National Middle School Association), attendance at conferences, professional reading, etc. If you coach or have interests in particular extracurricular activities these could also be highlighted in a special section. We suggest a brief, two or three sentence statement of your teaching philosophy at the beginning of each of the sections or subsections and a statement at the beginning of the portfolio that combines all of these. These can each be separate pages on your web site.

All the materials in your application packet, resume, letters of recommendation, teaching certificate, unofficial transcript, etc. should be included again in the portfolio. Pictures are worth a thousand words-photos of you with students from preinterning or interning are invaluable. Samples of outstanding student work done under your guidance should be included. Streaming video clips that capture moments of your teaching and/or student response on the web site are impressive. Interviewers usually do not have the time to read papers from courses at WMU, but succinct lesson plans, smart-looking handouts, tests or other materials you have created for the classroom are relevant. (On the other hand, it is very important to keep all your English and education papers and course material for future reference; be sure you have a clearly organized system of file folders that you can draw on in the years to come. You can build these materials onto your web site.)

Above all, the primary beneficiary of the portfolio is you. Your portfolio helps bring together your preparation and focus it toward the kind of teaching you want to do. It gives you confidence, helps you recognize how much you have accomplished, and just how lucky the district will be that gets you. To what extent the portfolio is part of the hiring process depends somewhat on you. At the interview you should take the initiative to pass it around and speak to/demonstrate specific things in it. If you leave it with the interview committee it may be ignored unless you have really drawn on it during the interview (anything you really want the interview committee to see should be separately copied and handed out by you to all members of the committee). Some places will ask to see the portfolio, and it is very useful at job fairs. Some places may not know much about these portfolios, they may not ask for them, and may not know what you are talking about when you bring them up. Be prepared to educate or drop the issue depending on the reaction you get.