If you want to apply for teaching jobs, many times you’ll need a professional teaching portfolio. But it shouldn’t be difficult to create your portfolio if you’ve been keeping track of your successful lesson plans and projects. During the teacher interview, you should be prepared to share your insights on what makes a lesson successful, your approach to handling discipline problems and your methods for engaging the class. If you’re a new or beginning teacher, make sure you also ask about mentoring and/or support systems for new teachers. If the principal doesn’t have an answer, that should be a red flag. All new teachers MUST have some kind of support during their first years. This is not merely a request, this is a necessity.
The principal does not care so much as to why seating chart “A” is better than seating chart “B” – but is interested in knowing your method for preventing discipline problems – monitoring students’ progress and your systems of effective classroom management.
Your professional teaching portfolio only needs to include information in the following categories:
Lesson Plans including different levels. You can also include pictures of students at different lessons/activities/trip.
Projects or performance tasks
Your teacher resume and recommendations
Awards (for your teaching, if any)
Professional Organizations (teaching related ones you currently belong to)
If you still haven’t landed a teaching job of your dreams, chances are you haven’t created a teaching portfolio that makes YOU stand out from the competition. And if you haven’t been called back, chances are you aren’t doing the proper steps for creating a professional teaching portfolio.
Not everyone is willing to take those extra steps to make themselves stand out from the competition. And nowadays, there’s A LOT of competition! So many teachers still continue to look for work in August hoping that a teaching job will pan out at the last minute. And that’s not a great situation to be in either.