AY 375 Fall 2013: Sixteenth Day Plan

The final class of Ay375 will feature professors talking about their teaching philosophies and a discussion of the Teaching Portfolio.

1. Keep a teaching portfolio. They are becoming increasingly important for faculty applications, and they serve as a good repository of your best teaching practices.
2. Always keep thinking about teaching, despite what the research mongrels at places like UC Berkeley might tell you. Teaching can have a positive impact on your research, because teaching requires you to consider new material from alternative points of view, which in turn leads to new insights. And it's fun!

Teachers visiting:

• Leo Blitz, long-time instructor of Ay10 and graduate courses.
• Eliot Quataert, first-time instructor of a non-majors course, frequent instructor of graduate courses, Ay7ab, and Ay160 (stars).
• Mariska Kriek, new faculty member and first-time instructor of Ay7a.
• Geoff Marcy, long-time instructor of Ay12, currently teaching Ay12 and Ay160.

Some prompts given to the teachers in advance:

• What class are you currently teaching? Have you taught it in the past? What other courses have you taught?
• For the course you’re currently teaching, what are your learning objectives and goals? How would you complete the sentence “At the end of the semester, I want my students to .” ?
• How do you assess (in lecture, with the GSIs in discussion section, on the exams) whether these goals are being met?
• If you have taught both non-major courses and major courses, how does preparing for those courses compare? How do your learning objectives for them differ?
• What is your lecture style like? Do you employ active learning strategies (think-pair-share, etc.) in your lectures?
• In your teaching experience, what strategies have you found to be effective? Not effective? (e.g., different lecture styles, type of homework problems, projects vs. exams, etc.)
• What do you like best about teaching?

As a class discussion:

• What about your philosophy has changed over the semester?
• What sort of themes pervade your teaching now?

More and more colleges and universities are reexamining their commitment to teaching and exploring ways to improve and reward it. Faculty are being held accountable to provide clear and concise evidence of the quality of their classroom teaching.

What is a teaching portfolio? It is a factual description of your teaching strengths and accomplishments. It includes documents and materials which collectively suggest the scope and quality of a professor's teaching performance. It is to teaching what lists of publications, grants, and honors are to research and scholarship.

The portfolio is not an exhaustive compilation of all the documents and materials that bear on teaching performance. Instead, it presents selected information on teaching activities and solid evidence of their effectiveness.

No teaching portfolio is the same, but there are some common elements:

Material on yourself:

• Statement of teaching philosophy
• List of teaching responsibilities, including course titles, numbers, enrollments, and, if applicable brief statement about how the course plays a role in the major.
• Representative course syllabi detailing course content and objectives, teaching methods, readings, and homework assignments.
• Participation in programs on sharpening instructional skills.
• Description of curricular revisions, instructional innovations.
• Description of steps taken to evaluate and improve one's teaching, including changes resulting from self-evaluation and time spent reading journals on teaching.

Material from others:

• Statements from colleagues who have observed you in the classroom.
• Student course evaluations (all of them, not hand-picked ones).
• Honors or recognitions from colleagues, such as teaching awards.
• Statements from students/alumni on the quality of instruction.

Products of Teacher/Student Learning:

• Scores on pre/post test exams.
• Examples of graded essays along with the your comments on why it was graded the way it was graded.
• Successive drafts of student papers along with your comments on how each draft could be improved.

GSI Resource Center Workshops on Teaching : Link. Some of these are required for the Certificate in Teaching.

1. None! We're done!