Chelsea Schelly

Teaching Portfolio

Reflective Essay

Creating a Teaching Portfolio:

A Personal Reflection

Creating a teaching portfolio has been a wonderful exercise in organization and reflexive thought. I would like to use this opportunity to reflect on the experience, highlighting what I found most difficult, and most beneficial, about the creation process.

While many may say that developing a teaching philosophy is the most difficult part of this process, I have to disagree. Perhaps it is because I have more experience being a teaching assistant than a teacher, so I have watched other people teach (without being able to interject my own style or ideas) and had time to reflect on what I would do differently or how the teaching styles I observe do or do not correspond to my own pedagogical goals. As I have reflected each semester on the experience of being a teaching assistant, I have had time to develop a personal philosophy on teaching and learning.

Taking a graduate seminar on the topic of teaching most likely also contributed to the development of my personal teaching philosophy. Because of these experiences, my thoughts flowed easily when I sat down to write out my own teaching philosophy.

What I found most difficult about this experience was the creation of assignments. Although I tried to be specific with regard to due dates and criteria for evaluation, I found it incredibly difficult to do so without a semester or particular class to reference. I hope that my style, assignments, and assessments evolve with each classroom experience; I certainly want them to be dependent upon the size of the classroom and the level of the students in the course. Creating assignments without reference to a specific time or class size was difficult for me. Yet I found it a valuable experience, and I am sure that I will go back to these assignments for both use and reflection.

I think the online accessibility of the teaching portfolio is an incredibly useful tool. I hope that I can continue to store example syllabi, creative lesson plans, or ideas for original classroom activities on my website. With easy access, simple organization, and an ever-evolving portfolio, this process will continue to be of use to me throughout my graduate education and into my teaching career.

I particularly liked creating my reflection journal for the website, which I did over a several month period. As ideas came to me, or I needed a space to reflect, the journal page served as a valuable tool. I hope it will be a useful resource for years to come.

I enjoy what I see as the duality of audiences for my teaching portfolio – potential future employers, and myself. While the portfolio is an incredibly personalized window into the contents of my thoughts and life goals, it is also an opportunity for future employers to get to know my teaching potential. By highlighting my own experiences and personalized teaching philosophy, as well as my ability to create assignments and lesson plans, I am making myself more marketable in the future.

Yet I have also created a space for storing my personal thoughts on teaching and learning. I hope to continue to use the space to reflect, to write down my thoughts, as well as to document both successes and failures in my teaching experiences. In this way, I am in some ways opening myself up to future employers (although they will unlikely take the time to read my journal entries or my reflective essay).

Most importantly, I have enjoyed this process as an experience. It has actually given me the opportunity to add to my experiences with and knowledge of teaching, and helped me refine my own teaching philosophy into a key set of guiding principles, including:

  1. Making classrooms an opportunity to develop not only specific knowledge but also more generally important life skills, such as organization and public speaking
  2. Encouraging critical thinking skills, particularly with regard to questioning common assumptions and ideas based on our socialization (because I will be teaching sociology)
  3. Creating a teaching style and assessment criterion that discourages procrastination or laziness
  4. Incorporating humor and discussion whenever possible

Right now, I would say that these are the four essentials for my own teaching style, and that they correspond with my teaching philosophy. I only hope that these goals will evolve over time, as I gain experience and insight, and that I will use this portfolio as an opportunity for continued reflection and endless personal evolution.