Welcome to: Preparing a teaching dossier: a conceptual approach and practical strategies

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Welcome toPreparing a teaching dossiera
conceptual approach and practical strategies

• Ros Woodhouse, PhD

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Goals

• To help create an effective teaching dossier, by
• understanding the components of a dossier their
  purpose
• outlining strategies for collecting and
  presenting evidence of teaching effectiveness

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• If you were on a hiring or PT committee, what
  would you want to know to assess a candidates
  educational contributions?
• What would you want others to know about your
  own educational work?

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Purpose of a dossier

• To demonstrate the
• scope and quality of our
• activities as a teacher

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Dossiers convey the quality of our work in ways
that are similar to other academic writing

• Dossiers and research papers/proposals show
• Knowledge/involvement in area
• Worthwhile purpose
• Appropriate methods
• Replicable results
• Reflection/discussion
• Impact and/or innovation

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Structure of a Dossier

• Statement of responsibilities (educational
  activities and roles) describes what you do
• Statement of teaching philosophy (goals and
  methods) describes how you go about it and why,
  similar to research introduction and method
• Evidence of effectiveness documents how well it
  works, similar to results and discussion

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Strategies for getting startedStatement of
teaching responsibilities A description of what
you do
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Describe your teaching responsibilities

• Did you include
• All levels of designated Yorks instruction?
• Outreach (community, other professionals)
• Educational contributions other than instruction
  (curriculum, learning resources (text or
  electronic), evaluation, course or programme
  administration, educational inquiry, faculty
  development)

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Tips

• Document the full range of your teaching
  activities
• Organize by skills and roles or kinds of
  contribution
• E.g. instruction (by learner levels, methods),
  curriculum or learning resource development,
  evaluation, administration, faculty development
  etc.)
• Describe what you do
• Use appendices for lists with details (students,
  presentations etc.) as supporting documents
• Identify as many sources of supporting material
  as possible you will use these later in the
  dossier!

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Strategies for getting startedTeaching
Philosophy

• Describes how and provides logic of why we
  approach our educational activities in a
  particular way

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• Purpose
• An executive summary, that will enhance your
  own and other readers understanding of your
  teaching
• Includes
• Description of goals and perspective on
  teaching/other educational activities
• Rationale for your choices
• Description of how you implement teaching/other
  activities to achieve these goals
• Extent to which your expectations were met
• What helped or hindered your success?
• Significance impact of this work

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Describe your goals for your learners

• Questions to stimulate your thinking
• Do these change for different kinds of learners,
  settings, or activities?
• How did you arrive at these goals?
• See Teaching Goals Inventory (see handout, Angelo
  Cross)

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What methods and strategies do you use to help
learners to achieve these goals, and why?

• Questions to stimulate your thinking
• Does your approach change according to
  characteristics of your goals, teaching setting,
  or the kind of learners you are teaching?
• Are there aspects of your field that are
  especially challenging for learners? How do you
  address this?
• How are your choices informed by your knowledge,
  experiences, and beliefs or values about learning
  and teaching?

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Strategies for getting startedEvidence of
effectiveness

• Your teaching results and discussion

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What kinds of evidence do you have/could you use
to document your effectiveness?

• How do these relate to the goals that you and
  your colleagues described earlier?
• Think about what you said you would like to know
  about someone as a teacher have you addressed
  this?

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Tips

• Keep all evaluations (ask for them!)
• Collect your own when these fail
• Think multiple perspectives (peers (content),
  instructional experts (process))
• Collect records of learning, use classroom
  assessment techniques (Angelo Cross)
• Keep samples of resources you develop, feedback,
  reports you produce etc.
• (see How am I teaching by Weimer et al.)

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Presenting evidence of effectiveness, effectively!

• Treat evidence gathering and presentation as you
  would your research data
• rigour (procedure, context, etc.)
• summarize quantitative data using graphs, charts,
  tables
• thematize comments
• reflective commentary on these results-how do you
  interpret this data? What action did you take?

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SummaryBuilding your role and your dossier

• What skills are you using or developing?
• What activities or roles will allow you to
  develop or demonstrate your skills?
• Be proactive about data collection!
• Aim/look for consistency, completeness of
  alignment across goals, methods, and evidence

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If you remember nothing else from this session

• Successful ... dossiers are the result of
  proactive planning rather than retrospection
• (Vanderford, Eison Olive, 1996)