How to tell your authentic teaching story — University Affairs
A cross-institutional, open-source series helps graduate students and postdocs articulate their teaching experiences for different career paths.
Career readiness can be a complex and challenging endeavor for many graduate students and postdocs, particularly as they explore a range of potential career paths in and outside of academia. The ability to synthesize, articulate, and leverage classroom experience through effective storytelling is a critical ingredient to success on this journey. So how do you capture a coherent story about your teaching experience in an effective teaching portfolio?
This was the challenge that a multi-institutional collaboration between graduate students, educational developers and professional professionals from five Ontario universities (Toronto Metropolitan University, University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, University of Windsor and Western University) sought to find a solution. The result? A “Developing Your Teaching Dossier” series (developed with H5P as an open educational resource under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license) available to everyone through the Open Library of eCampusOntario and the University of Toronto.
Articulate your story in the four modules
The series consists of four 60-minute, asynchronous, self-paced modules. These modules recognize different trajectories and offer different ways of presenting content, as well as multiple forms of reflection and expression, regardless of your level of experience or the timing of career exploration.
Module 1: Reflecting on Your Teaching Experience: An Introduction to Teaching Dossiers defines teaching dossiers and their purpose to help you identify and recognize common components of dossiers across academic disciplines. By examining different frameworks for reflection on classroom experiences, you can develop a plan/system for gathering and documenting classroom experiences, classroom development and classroom-related activities that relate to the foundations of a classroom dossier.
Module 2: Articulate Your Teaching Values and Practices: Develop Your Teaching Philosophy Statement examines the characteristics of an effective teaching philosophy statement (STP) and explains its purpose. By reflecting on your teaching values, teaching strategies, and their combined impact on student learning, you can begin to identify transferable teaching skills, articulate key beliefs about your teaching approach, and incorporate them into your own personalized STP.
Module 3: Connecting Narratives and Evidence: Developing Components of Your Lesson Dossier examines the common components of a lesson dossier and strategies for aligning the various sections into a coherent narrative. When you construct a story about your teaching values and practices, you can develop strategies to combine narratives and artifacts—key pieces of evidence that support the claims you make about your teaching.
Module 4: Looking Ahead: Telling New Stories About Our Teaching Experiences integrates teaching dossiers into your career exploration and links them to other professional documents (diversity statements, cover letters and interviews). By applying the teaching values, experiences, and skills articulated in your instructional dossier to other professional documents, you can improve your ability to convey the value of your teaching experience to broad audiences.
Reflect on your teaching history
The series integrates a range of voices and lived experiences from PhD students and recent graduates. Participants explore different strategies and methods rooted in videos and narratives, resources and examples, as well as interactive activities and workbooks. Dossier component examples and reflection videos by students of the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering illustrate the iterative, non-linear and versatile paths in teaching development. What holds these different teaching paths and threads in the teaching portfolio together is the teaching history. The resource invites you to identify your classroom stories and think about what new stories you will tell in your career development.
Fostering the journey of teaching to storytelling
Every storytelling journey will be unique. As such, the Developing Your Lesson Dossier series welcomes various levels of customization to guide you through the process. The series invites you to identify and seek additional support and resources to help you tell an effective, clear, and comprehensive story about your teaching experiences. Accessing support and resources may include contacting your institutional career center or a teaching and learning center, connecting with peers and mentors, and exploring career development opportunities. As you explore your teaching experiences, ensure that reflection, identity exploration, and self-development remain key components of your unique storytelling journey.
Calling educational developers, career educators, learning strategists, or faculty members supporting graduate students and postdocs! The series (and the numerous components of each module) is ready to be adapted into your current and future doctoral and post-doctoral professional development programme. Watch the series’ Institutional Guide to learn how, and help graduate students and postdocs share their authentic classroom stories.