Portfolios from the Past
I was just visiting Standford’s Center for Teaching and Learning, skimming their back issues of a quarterly newsletter called Speaking of Teaching and found this article from 1996. It’s about teaching portfolios…not blogfolios mind you. Anyway, something that jumped out at me was a box that listed “The Products of Good Teaching”.
Listed in the box are:
student test scores, lab workbooks, creative work and fieldwork reports
records of students who go on to major, do honors work, or do graduate work in the field
documentary evidence of the effects of teaching on students’ career choices
Let’s look at these a minute. Are the items of the first list truly reflective of my work as the teacher or of their work as the student? I suppose that the answer is a bit of both, but I would personally want to point at these things and talk about how they reflect the students’ hard work, diligence and self-discipline.
The next list doesn’t quite apply to ES/FL I think. It’s hard to imagine that there will be many students over the course of career who choose to become English language teachers regardless of my positive influence. That being said, it would be possible to point to students who completed their engineering studies (in English) with distinction, but again how much of their success can I take credit for?
The last list again doesn’t quite apply. I suppose a close corollary would be testimonials of students about the nature of my teaching style and classroom environment. To that end, I have in my possession a letter of recommendation written by a student who was also a sort of superintendent for my host country’s ministry of education. I think having such a letter written by an educator is particularly gratifying because the positive comments mean potentially more than “I like Daniel. He’s a nice person.” which is what so many student evaluations tend to say at their core.
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