Sample teaching portfolios

https://depaul.digication.com/mark_lazio_teaching_portfolio/Welcome/published

http://www.rebeccaandersonphd.com/uploads/2/8/7/8/28780855/teaching_portfolio_-_overview.weebly.pdf

https://sites.google.com/site/murdocksengl540site/teaching-philosophy

4.1 Rigid rules-inflexible plans, and workshop on process narrative

Guidelines for feedback to process narrative (based on assignment sheet):
1. What focus is set up in the introduction?  Does this focus accurately forecast the "findings" with some specificity?
2. Where /how does the essay meet each criteiron on the assignment sheet?
3. What makes the findings non-trivial?   (richness contributed by the personal experience; specific observations coupled with logical explanations/interpretations for what those specific observations mean)
4. How/where does the essay use detailed particular expereinces?  Where would it benefit from more development?
5. What do the experiences illustrate with respect to the focus?

In your groups, you took turns reading your essays to each other.  Then you discussed the above to ensure that the draft essay met the requirements for the assignment.

Discussion of Rose:
Introduction is a model for an academic research essay!  introduces the problem, states (clearly and with some particularity) what his essay adds to the discussion.

Focus of essay: Stated at the end of the third paragraph.

Terms to define:
Rules, algorithms, heuristics, plans, set

Overview of findings:
Algorithms rather than heuristics
Questionable heuristics made algorithmic
Set
The plan that is not a plan
Feedback
Too many rules resulting in conceptual conflict

Write: do you have any - conscious or not so conscious- rules or plans in your writing process?  How do they work for you?

For next week:
Read: Selections from Arola, Sheppard and Ball: Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects
Write: Post the revised (final) Process Narrative, your summary of the peer review from your group for your essay (the comments from your group); and all assignments for the unit to your portfolio

What is due for the process narrative:

writing on invention 1,28

writing on drafting 2.11

writing on revision 2.25

draft process narrative 3.24

peer comments  4.8

due with final draft 4.8

Sample first paragraph

It was after moving to the USA and studying English as second language that I started to notice my writing process. I used to think of writing as something that flows naturally, more naturally for some people then to others. Before learning a second language, I thought the things I am used to do before and while I am writing were just habits and not a process that I have developed throughout the years as my writing faced different environments, audiences and purposes. Learning a second language forced me to pay more attention to these “habits” in order to improve my writing skill. Writing in English then became a huge challenge of recognizing my writing process, something that I never thought about it before. Therefore, I noticed that a few aspects like the environment I feel comfortable writing, the technologies I use and my invention process did not altered as I faced the task of writing in a second language. However, other aspects involving drafting, revising and control changed as I was adapting to write in English.

3.25 James Gee and Workshop

Main points from Gee
Language is a social process
Discourse embodies a group's ways of doing, being, believing, and valuing = an "identity toolkit"
Discourse is learned through an "apprenticeship" (socialization => learning through doing) rather than "out of a book"
Discourses overlap, influence one another and are always changing
Our home/Primary discourse is the discourse of our home community (family)
All other discourses are secondary discourses
Dominant discourses enforce their values/ways of being on Nondominant discourses
Discourses are used for gatekeeping => excluding outsiders
tensions between values in different discourses can cause problems in terms of moving from one discourse to another successfully
Discourses require complete mastery to be counted an insider
Primary discourses can never be lieratory discoures

All writing and reading is embedded in some Discourse

Definition of discourse (in our own words)
Discourses belong to a group and shap the intentions and behaviors of the group.  They embody unconscious ways of thinking, related to a setting, and giving "rules" for how to act.  Discourses are cultural, and include beliefs and values that are embedded in ways of talking and being.

List of discursive features (what Discourse affects/shapes)
1. patterns for asserting or responding to authority
2. language choices and forms (story forms) => what and how we say things
3. body language, personal space, body position
4. who has the right to speak
5. expectations about who "others" and "other places" are (stereotypes)
6. how to behave + what to believe and think within a given profession, career, nationality, ethnicity, etc.
7.  where and when we can say certain things (context)
8. expectations about tone of voice, volume, pitch, how fast we talk and so on
9. attitudes

So it sounds to me like you've got a good hand on this.  As we discussed in class, an awareness of how discourses (our home discourses and the secondary discourses we have acquired through experience) function as "gatekeepers" can empower us.  If we learn to watch and work more consciously with the "discourses of power" - (despite what Gee says?) we can perhaps, communicate in ways which are more suited to our purposes.  Thinking about Discourse will be particularly important to you as you compose your portfolio of writing for your future profession.  We will talk about particular ways to apply ideas from Gee as we get closer to the portfolio assignment.

Focus:

What is the focus of your process narrative?  How does that focus reply to/expand on the demands for the focus of the assignment?  Describe how & whether the ideas and breadth of your focus are a good match for the assignment.   

List the points you make to develop your focus.  Describe how/whether these points are sufficient to develop your focus?  Any points off focus?  Any points you need to add?

How does each paragraph connect to/develop the focus? 

Organization:

Overall organization: What is the overall “narrative line” of your essay? (chronological description of one or more processes?  Discussion of the parts of the writing practice, in order?  a story of your growth? a comparison of your writing practices for different kinds of writing?  . . .?)  

Do you have more than one narrative line?  If so, describe how you connect them.

Considering the overall narrative thread of your essay = what is the best organization for the presentation of your points to develop your focus?

What transitions/connections do you make among the different points to develop your focus?

Internal organization of paragraphs: 

Do paragraphs lead in with a statement to set up the overall focus of the paragraph and the connection of that focus to a main point or the overall focus?

Does the developing material include analysis, illustration, example, rich description etc to “prove” the idea at the center of the paragraph (or does it simply re-state the overall point)?

Does each paragraph develop a single idea related to the overall focus?

Does each paragraph conclude with (include) a statement to tie the development to the overall point?

Development

Which points are most important to your overall focus?  What examples/illustrations from your “data” on your writing process have you used to support those points?  

Have you included rich descriptions of your process from a particular composing experience (rather than only general statments about “how you write” for a particular genre)?  If you have no descriptions of composing a particular text, what do you need to add?

Which points have the most development?  Which points have the least?  Are the points with the most development the most central to your overall discussion?

What points need more development?

For next week:
Read: Mike Rose's "Rigid Rules, INflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer's Block"
Write: Plan for revising process narrative (post to portfolio)

If you send me your draft process narrative as an attachment to the course email, I will write comments which you can take into consideration as you work on revising your essay.

3.11 Using a design model to plan/revise writing projects

We started class with a discussion of the readingby Wysoki & Lynch.  They present a design approach to composing,  and as we noted in our conversation, this approach is particularly useful (necessary) for considering projects which use more and different media or modes different from print.  Their piece is fairly straightforward, and in sum, the set forward the steps indeveloping a communication project as follows.

1. purpose
2. audience expectations
3. larger context
4. communication strategies
5. choice of medium
6. order/arrangement
7. testing your work on a sample audience

After talking through what each of these steps entails, we read through a sample process narrative (posted in the second unit within the course readings, linked to the right).  We then assessed this project using the three methods for reflecting on writing which we have covered so far: using a writing rubric based on the requirements for the assignment; using the kind of writerly response suggested by Elbow; and using the "design" principles suggested by Wysoki & Lynch.  Each of these approaches considers the writing from a different perspective.

The assignment sheet-based assessment looked at writing as a product = a "thing" which either has or does not have the required features.

Elbow's approach looks at writing as an interactive communication - which evokes (or not) particular responses from its various audiences.

Wysoki and Lynch's list of design principles looks at composing as a process, and engages writers in reflecting on whether and how they have successfully engaged different considerations within that process.

Reviewing your work in light of these different perspectives can help you decide uponwhat and how to revise a work in process.

This review took all but about 5 minutes of the class, so you didn't really have much time to work on your draft process narrative.   Hopefully, what we did do - reading/evaluating the sample process narrative - gave you some ideas for thinking the form and content for your narrative.

For next class:
Read: "Origins & Forms of Writing" Denise Schmandt-Besserat and Michael Erard; <= (We won't be reading this first one.)  Introduction to Sociolinguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourse, James Gee
AND
the sample process narratives.
Write:  Draft process narrative - send as an attachment to the course email + post to the portfolio.

Make sure you have done the pre-writing  (writing to the various prompts on your writing process which are posted on the blog) and posted it to your portfolio before you do the draft.  As stated in the assignment sheet, this essay should document (describe in detail from observation) and analyze your writing process, and to do the analysis you need observations.

For the draft - don't worry about editing/spelling/perfect (or even complete) sentences.  Focus on getting all your observations and ideas onto the page.  IF the focus is not quite clear to you - that is OK, too.  We will work on in in the peer review on 4.4.

What we will do in class. After discussing the readings, we will review + evaluate the sample process narratives.

Have a great break, and see you in two weeks!

3.4 Cooking = more writing for the process narrative

Grades for literacy narrative:  Each of you should have recieved an email with the scoring for your literacy narrative.  If you have missing documents and you want to receive full credit for your work - all revised/make up work for the literacy narrative is due by 3.11 = next week.  No work for the literacy narrative will be accepted after that time.

Also - I added up the points wrong (gave scores out of 100 points when it should have been out of 125).  I don't think this error will change anyone's letter grade, and I will give you corrected scores with the next unit.

Cooking!
Cooking is the where we get the energy for our ideas - the "OH!  I want to write this. . .! " feeling that propels us forward and takes us deeper into our understanding of our material as well as our facility in putting that material into words.

Elbow said that when he started thinking about cooking, he understood it to be simply writing freely = freewriting.  As he pursued this idea he realized that it is not JUST the open access to ideas such as freewriting allows - but the "interaction between contrasting or conflicting material." See the top of p. 49 for a more detaileddiscussion.  We started with reviewing your ideas + freewriting to set you up for the cooking exercises.

1. Read through the writing you have done so far for the process narrative.  This includes all of the writing you have done to document your writing process for the literacy narrative, plus the writing you did for homework last week to document any other process which you might want to focus on for the process narrrative.    I also invited you to note or add  any other information you thought would be important to include for the process narrative.

2. Freewriting.  The next step in our overview of the cooking process was to do a freewrite.

3. After freewriting, you did some "looping": noting patterns/repetitions in the freewrite and then doing a second freewrite to develop those ideas.  Some patterns you might look for include: associations to feelings (which parts were positive/which parts were negative?  what are the connections between these feelings and the content?); repetitions of words or ideas; overall themes.

Looping is one way to move from the immersion of freewriting - into the particularity+ self-consciousness of analysis and then back to immersion (in the  next freewrite).  As Elbow points out the contrast/conflict between these ways of thinking can help generate the energy/ideas that can move you forward in your writing.

4. Our next move was to write a list of metaphors for your writing process.  Then step back and look at the features of the metaphors you chose.  What does each metaphor say about your writing process?  Do the metaphors present a common theme about your process?   The idea here is that a metaphors pose features which you might not have named by themselves, but which you will see as present in the metaphor.

5.  Finally - we crossed modes by desribing your writing process as an image, a song, a dance or some other "non-languaged" system for representation.

After we finished "cooking"using a range of Elbow's approaches, you talked in groups to pull together the ideas you gained through the various processes we worked through.  The protocol for these conversations is as follows.

1. Characterize/discuss your writing process in terms of the different prompots we worked through for cooking: Freewriting, looping (moving between words + ideas, immersion and stepping back); listing-analyzing metaphors; moving among modes.

2. Describe what you think you might use as a focus for your proces narrative in light of these cooking exercises.

3. Discuss what additional observations you might need to gather/use to develop this focus for your essay.

4. Discuss which exercises worked best for you.

For next class:
Read: Ann Wysoki and Dennis Lynch: "A Rhetorical Process for Designing Compositions"
Write: Post today's class writing to your process page as "cooking" and develop any additional observations you will need to write the process essay with the focus you have decided on.

2.25 Talking about Elbow + work on the process narrative

Below are the questions we used to frame the discussion of Elbow.  
How did Elbow use his writing diary?
What does he mean by writing that growing writing is not just producing words and throwing some away? (p. 32)
What was hardest for Elbow about his writing process?  What's hardest for you?
What are some of the realizations Elbow arrived at from watching his writing process? (p. 36)
What does he mean by thinking about writing in terms of a developmental model?  Do you believe in this idea?  (p.44)
What are your "stages" for writing a "long" assignment?

We focused on the chapter about growing your writing, the chapter on the drafting process.  Elbow takes a developmental approach to writing, thinks of the writing process as organic, emphasizes that writing is a place where you discover what you have to say, and points out that although there is some chaos (discomfort) in writing when you don't know what you have to say - that is they way writing often works.

Although process theory can make writing seem like it is linear - starting with invention, moving through invention, and then proceeding through revision and editing - Elbow's discussion points out that for many if not most of us it is much messier. Still, even though they are much more mixed up, it remains useful to talk about writing process in terms of figuring out ideas (finding what we have to say) = invention; drafting (getting what we have to say into some approximation of the form we want to use to say it); and revision (refining, sharpening and in some cases completely changing the form and content of what we have written through adding, deleting, substituting and rearranging our draft).

Elbow's chapter put us in a good position to talk about the process narrative (see assignment sheet posted to the right) which is what we spent the rest of class working on.  First we did some writing on the revision process for the literacy narrative (so you have some evidence of your process for revising).  The prompts we used are listed below.

Writing about revision
What was your overall stragetgy for revising?
(respond to feedback from Chandler?  from peers? check whether you met the requirements on the assignment sheet? correct/errors?  read for the overall "flow" of the essay? some combination of these?) Write as much as you can about how you acted on that strategy, step by step.
Did you use one strategy at a time, or everything at once?  For example, did you revise for focus, then for organization, and then for development, and then proofread?  Or everything at once?
What role did finding your focus play in the revision process (did your draft still leave you in the "chaos" phase described by Elbow - or did you already have a strong focus from the draft and just work on sharpening that focus)?
How did you handle the invention that you needed to do in your revising process?
If you needed to draft additional sections, how did you manage going back and forth between re-reading what you'd already written and writing additional sections?
What were the most important changes you made?  What was the most frequent "kind" of revision you made: addition, deletion, substitution, reorganization
How did you feel as you revised?

After a short discussion, we took a look at the assignment sheet, and noted that one of the requirements was to reflect on how your writing process was changing, and to think about how you might want to further change it in the future.  Rather than have you reflect in a general way on how your process has changes, you did some writing about your process from HS and college.  The prompts are listed below.

How is your writing process changing/growing?  
how did you write in high school?  for English papers?  for research paper?
How did you write when you came to college (college english)?  Were the changes you made successful?  Any changes you feel you might need to make?
Describe your writing process for writing a long paper.  Were you successful? Was it stressful?  What might you need to change?

After you wrote to these prompts, we listed some words to describe your process for HS, and for college, and noted how these practices correlated with the audience (teacher) expectations, the purpose for your writing (for the grade, to complete the assignment) and the form.

below is a sampling of notes from this discussion:

HS
step-by-step
teacher centered (for the grade)
follow teacher's directions (formulaic)
very conscious of what the teacher expected

stream of consciousness
one-shot through
teacher centered

notes=> cheat sheet
invent conclusion
aural/participation (rather than from written directions)
write question

College
longer, fewere sources=> more original thought
brainstorm
find idea
switch writing around (revision)
more organic rather than formulaic

We used these descriptions as a way to notice some general changes as students moved from HS to college:  students took more ownership of their writing, meaning they wrote more for themselves than for the teacher; they were writing for a different, often more demanding audience, and they were writing in new (unfamiliar sometimes) genres => these changes in audience, purpose + form for the writing caused students to spend more time on finding their meanings (because they were their meanings), to spend more time revising.  What the particular changes are will be different for different writers, but in general, as the demands and contexts for writing change, so does the process.

We didn't get a chance to go through the last exercise I had planned for today, which was to do some naming (categorizing) of what is going on in the processes you have been describing in the writing posted to your process page.  Below I have posted a list of moves to make to do some of that categorizing.  You will work through some version of this process in class, next week, both working on your own writing, and working in groups.

Identifying some categories for your process essay
Look at what you have written about the different parts of your writing process: invention, drafting, revising, editing.
Pay attention both to the content of what you have written + the feeling.
As we did with the writing you did for the prompts about how your writing has changed, list some words to characterize your writing for each part of the process

Are there any words, ideas, feelings that come up over and over in your writing about any part of the writing process, or in your writing about the writing process as a whole?
What are the most "important" words to characterize what you do in each part of the process?

Then, make some notes about what you did and how the audience, purpose and genre (form) of the writing influenced the kind of writing you did for each part of the process.

For next class:
Read: Elbow, Chapter 3
Write: any additional descriptions of writing process you will need for your process essay


What should be posted for the process page so far:
1.28 writing for the 3 questions on the Literacy narrative (invention) Title the post: 1.28Name_Technologies
2.11 writing on process for drafting the literacy narrative
2. 18 observations about your writing process (the kind of reflective observations we worked on in class last week - but for writing projects/processes other than the literacy narrative
2. 25 writing on process for revising literacy narrative
2.25 writing on how writing process is changing