As we prepare for the close of another semester, we are provided with an opportunity to reflect on our teaching practice and identify ways to share it with others. The Arts & Science Office of Ed Tech supports faculty who wish to publish their Scholarship of Teaching and Learning work, but for those looking for a way to share their teaching in a personalized way, we recommend developing a digital portfolio to support your teaching philosophy. Whether you are a graduate student, post-doc, clinical faculty, adjunct, or tenure track faculty member, creating a portfolio can help you connect theory with the practice of teaching through the creation of evidence to support your narrative. In addition, the process of gathering and evaluating teaching artifacts facilitates the deep reflection needed to produce a new or revise an existing teaching philosophy.
When determining how to document your teaching, there are many questions and issues to consider beyond selecting what materials to showcase. How will you protect students’ information and prevent FERPA violations? How will you maintain these artifacts in a sustainable way? How will you share your portfolio and ensure all materials are fully accessible to viewers? Our Document Your Teaching Guide provides a detailed framework for curating teaching artifacts that will support your teaching philosophy, as well as faculty examples of the elements you may want to feature. In addition, the Document Your Teaching: Technical How-To Guide provides step by step instructions for capturing and sharing your work with common tools in a sustainable and accessible way.
Florencia Rabuco, a graduate student from the MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish program, used the principles detailed in these guides to document the final project she completed for our Teaching To Engage course.
You can view her screencast via NYU Stream.
Through the use of a practice site on Brightspace, Florencia protects student information by displaying her course design without any current student work. Florencia’s video was recorded and captioned using NYU Stream, which enabled her to provide an accessible voiceover to explain elements of her course design.
Please contact us if you would like support as you design your portfolio. We love to share the outstanding work of our faculty, so if you have an innovative course design that we could include in our Instructor Design Gallery, please let us know!