My Teaching Portfolio

Teaching Portfolio
(How to and some tips)

I believe that you must consider making a teaching portfolio to showcase your success as a teacher when going for an interview or even into schools as part of your placement. Please don't think this will guarantee you a job, as I write this it currently hasn't found me one but I have had excellent feedback from headteachers and governors about mine. 

It has come in extremely handy when in the middle of interview when asked such a question like; "Tell me about your classroom management" or " How do you self evaluate?" You can simply pull out your ace card (teaching portfolio) and show examples and hopefully dazzle the interviewers. 

Lets begin...

You need an eye catching front page, one which represents yourself and could possibly show off you ICT skills. Coming as an ICT specialist I felt I needed to have a high quality design as a front cover. A simple front page would do, it's whats inside that really matters but I have gone for simplicity and elegance. I only included my name, my email and my contact number here. You wouldn't need much more here for a front cover. I also spent a little bit on the binder as I found cheap cardboard ones got rather dented and fell to bits after being in my bag.

A simple but eye catching front cover

My first page as soon as you open my portfolio is a very personal education philosophy. My lecturers at University were very adamant that this be the first piece of information that should be included within our portfolios. Strangely before the table of contents but you can decided what suits best for yourself. 

Don't spend too long trying to create your own. If you love teaching as much as I do then it should come naturally to you. This took me about a couple of hours to word it perfectly. Being a visual person, I fiddled around with having a transparent background and the spacing of each line and section. I'm happy for you to share this and modify it yourself, leave a comment and I'm happy to send you a copy of it if it's tricky to see in the image.

A personal educational philosophy

After this document is my table of contents. I've broken it down into 7 sections:

1. Lesson Plans

2. Medium Term Plans

3. Classroom Management

4. Photos

5. Wall Displays

6. Recommendations

7. Teaching Certificates & Transcripts

I got so picky over this bit. I chopped and change this part of my portfolio so many times but came to the agreement that I would colour match the sections to the colour of my dividers, (so OCD of me). However, leave this to last. Decide what sections you want to include and use post-it notes to keep them in order so you know what is going in what section. I didn't want too many sections so I kept it to the seven that I have mentioned above but you may add more or less to how you feel. 

Table of contents

My first section included lesson plans from my numerous placements whilst on my degree. I used the core subjects (literacy, numeracy and science) to show how in-depth my lessons were planned. I also included a phonics lesson plan as that would be key if going for a job in early years and key stage one. 

I believe it is vital that the lesson plans you include are annotated all over, this was easy for me as I had to annotate my lesson plans to pass any teaching placement. I used my university modified plans as they included all the necessary requirements any lesson plan should hold. I added extra annotations to my plans at this stage to make them even better, (only you would know this). If you have any photos from the lessons you are about to include, include them here. Again, makes it easier for whoever is going through your portfolio to understand your lesson plan. 

Make sure your lesson plans are annotated

I decided to add in a section showing my medium term plans. To be honest, I hadn't seen any other blog posts showing these but I thought I'll add it in. Least it demonstrates I can plan a topic over a half-term or full term in a range of different subjects. I included three different medium term plans in this section to show variety of my planning abilities.

Medium term plans based on different topics

My section on classroom management was the hardest part of this whole process and took me the longest to create and type up. I had seen on a few other peoples blogs that they have included sections based on this so I decided to give it go. Once I got started, I couldn't stop typing. I talked about how  I would deal with behaviour issues, wall displays, table layouts, class assessment and many more issues that you'll be aware of that you may want to include within your classroom.

My personal classroom management

My biggest section: Photos. Coming from a 4 year degree all about teaching, I had endless amounts of photos at my disposal. I suggest you show a range of photos from teaching different practical activities from literacy, numeracy and science. I have been lucky enough to go on year 6 retreats, so I included photos from that. I have also done some volunteering work for children's charities so I added some photos from that experience as well.

I thought it would be nice to add a brief description under each photo explaining what is happening or what I am doing incase my portfolio is getting looked at when I'm not around. This has happened to me previously and the headteacher really enjoyed going through my photos.

Add as many as photos as possible

My favourite part of teaching next..... Wall displays. Love them or hate them, their time consuming but provide an invaluable resource for the classroom, if produced and designed in an interactive way that the children can interact with. 

From my numerous placements, I have had the opportunity to make a few wall displays for different topics or subjects in most years across the curriculum. Laminated and stuck on colourful card, they really stand out in your teaching portfolio and showcase your art and creative side.

Show off your creative side with wall displays

Coming towards the end of my portfolio now. I've decided to show the final two photos and do the last couple of sections together as there pretty self-explaining. On the left, insert as many recommendations you have collected over your time as a trainee or an actual teacher. Your mentors should have written a report about your qualities as a teacher whilst on placement so I added all mine. The final section, added in my degree certificate, QTS award and my transcripts from university.