Below are guidelines for this section of your portfolio. When you’re ready, delete the text on this page and replace with your own content.

Here is your opportunity to sketch the story of your development, to in particular show your thinking about yourself and your purposes as a teacher working in a setting characterized by culturally and linguistically diverse students, about your teaching, how it has developed, and how it is expressed in your actual practice. It is an opportunity to demonstrate your commitment to reflection and continuous learning as a teacher as well.

• Teaching philosophy and identity: Please reflect on your sense of purpose, your goals, and your personal, social and theoretical stance as a teacher working with students in your institutional, social and political context.
  • Consider your philosophy in enabling all students to learn, participate, develop their voices, develop their academic capabilities, draw on their social and cultural strengths, etc. Consider your view of powerful learning and teaching practice.
  • You might consider key ideas about learning in a particular discipline, how they are informed by research and knowledge in the field, and how you enacted them.
  • Consider your own social and teacher identity—how would you identify yourself as a teacher?
• Reflection on growth: How has your teaching practice grown? How has your understanding of yourself as a teacher (your teacher identity) grown?
  • You might consider the challenges of developing a learning community in your context in which all students are respected as persons and supported in their intellectual work;
  • You might consider the challenge of making learning authentic, meaningful, and equitable;
  • You might consider the challenge of deciding how to support different students, learning to recognize and build on their various strengths and capacities;
• Illustrate your growth: You might identify and illustrate one or more defining moments in the development of your practice and/or your understanding of practice (see examples of what you might include in the next frame). Link to other sections of your portfolio for examples and illustration as appropriate.

Examples

There are many possible artifacts to use to illustrate your philosophy and your philosophy as manifested in your practice over time (your growth), for example:

• Comparative journal entries (early/late in the year);
• Comparison of early/late videotapes
• Comparison of early/late CUPs or learning plans (for example: that illustrate how you have adapted your practice to your different students’ needs, or developed in your ability to represent a teaching discipline, or to scaffold learning for different students)
• References to readings
• Epiphanies in your journal
• Changes in your students as learners and what they reflect about your development as a teacher
• Examples of student work that illustrate your philosophy/hopes for student learning in practice