Jamie Goodwin
Your student teaching portfolio should showcase who you are as a teacher. It should show potential employers your ideas, objectives, methods, assessment, improvements made, and effectiveness as a teacher. Some of the things that you might want to include in your portfolio are your teaching philosophy, lesson plans, and sample assignments.
But what can you do to stand out from other student teaching portfolios? How can you show potential buyers that you’re the person that they should hire? Try these top student teaching portfolio ideas.
Organization
Organization is key when it comes to creating a professional portfolio. Start by gathering materials. Purchase a quality professional binder, dividers, tabs, and sheet protectors. Then, create a title page and table of contents. Add a summary or explanation for each section and activity. As you assemble your portfolio, keep everything neat, polished, and professional.
Creativity
Although you should focus on using student teaching portfolio ideas to make it as professional as possible, a little bit of creativity can be a great way to make your portfolio stand out. Creativity will show your personality as a teacher. For example, you could include pictures of activities that you did in class. Be careful about taking pictures of your students. However, you could have your cooperating teacher take pictures of you teaching or include photos of any bulletin boards that you created for your unit.
Digital
It’s wise to bring your student teaching portfolio with you to an interview. That doesn’t mean that it’s not a good idea to send a digital portfolio along with your resume, though. You could either scan all of the pages in and send it as a PDF attachment or create a digital portfolio. When making it, remember these tips.
- Use Blogger, WordPress, or Weebly.
- Choose a URL that will be easy for the interviewers to remember.
- Use a professional template with a clean design.
- Make sure that your portfolio is easy to navigate.
- Include an About Me page, your resume, your teaching philosophy, lesson plans, and links to your professional social media sites.
- Don’t include everything from your student teaching portfolio on your digital one. In fact, it’s fine to include a summary of the activities with pictures of the examples.
- Don’t just upload PDFs of lesson plans that someone would need to download to see.
When you get to your teaching job interview, use your student teaching portfolio to show examples of your effectiveness as a teacher. Refer to your lesson plans, student samples, assessments, and other parts of your portfolio. You may even want to make copies of your student teaching portfolio, so you can leave it with the interviewers.
With the way these student teaching portfolio ideas can help increase your chances of getting a job, take the time to start gathering ideas and assembling your portfolio early on in your student teaching assignment.
