English 500, Fall 2007

Assignment for Draft Reflective Teaching Portfolio

Overview
Collect: As a teacher committed to growth and reflection, you have been collecting evidence of your growth, theoretical grounding, and informed practice.  You have also been given ample opportunity to reflect on your class readings and classroom experience through WebBoard posts and class discussions throughout the semester.  You may have saved email to or from your students that demonstrates some aspect of your growth. Some of you have also taught before, and may have saved artifacts that demonstrate your progress as a teacher. 

Select: Consider all these documents and reflections as raw materials from which you will select the most appropriate for your electronic teaching portfolio.  Decide which five to ten items best illustrate your growth and philosophy as a teacher, and create web pages for them (save as web page or copy paste into a new web page).  If you have more than ten items that you feel really belong in your electronic portfolio, you may use them.  But be sure you have something to say about each item in your reflection.

Reflect: Then create a webbed overview reflection that links out to the various artifacts and comments.  You might structure your overview as a loose essay charting your chronological growth before, during this semester, and predicted for next semester, using hypertext links to your evidence when appropriate.  Or you might create a "front page" for your portfolio, with a short list of links to reflection and evidence on a number of topics related to your teaching and learning about teaching.
Purpose and Audience: Consider this electronic portfolio as a rough draft of a more polished teaching portfolio that you will be able to show to prospective employers in the future, after you finish English 500 next spring. All three of your instructors will read and respond to your portfolio, but consider your audience more generally as prospective employers and anyone involved with and concerned about the teaching of writing at the college level.  You need not have everything finished by the time you give us the URL in December, but, as much as possible, please try to indicate what the "finished" teaching portfolio might look like when May comes around.
Possible topics on which to reflect: Consider any aspect of your teaching English 103, your learning in English 500, or composition studies, theoretical or applied, that this semester of teaching and English 500 has made you think about. Some obvious but rich possibilities might include any items on the list below, and their relation to the objectives set forth in the English 500 syllabus.
  •  your philosophy of teaching
  •  your reactions to the ideas presented in the class readings
  •  your perceptions of your greatest successes and/or challenges over the semester
  •  your approach to any of the following, as demonstrated through artifacts
  • the writing process as a whole
  • prewriting
  • revision
  • style
  • teaching grammar/usage
  • teaching modes of discourse
  • the usefulness of handbooks
  • the role of assigned readings in a composition class
  • the role of computers/Internet in a composition class
  • the role of web pages/electronic portfolios in a composition class
  • peer-editing pedagogies
  • conferencing with student writers
  • evaluation and response to writing
  • leading class discussion
  • managing group work
    • Details: You may reflect in a personal narrative or a persuasive style, or some combination of the two.To show your familiarity with composition pedagogy, please make an effort to use the assigned readings from our English 500 class to ground your observations. The conferences on the required readings on our ENGL 500 WebBoard would be great places to start drafting your reflections on our course texts.  Additional research is permissible but not required; your own thoughts and observations are most important.
    Duedate: Post the URL of your electronic teaching portfolio to the Electronic Teaching Portfolio conference on WebBoard by 4:30 PM, Friday December 7.

    Feel free to discuss your ideas with any one of us and/or share a draft in progress!
    Last updated on August 17,  2007
    by Michael Day
    E-mail me!