Creating your teaching dossier: tips and strategies from SFU instructors

Do you need to create a teaching dossier for an award, tenure and promotion process or job application?

A teaching dossier is a comprehensive, reflective document that showcases instructors’ teaching philosophy, practices, accomplishments, and growth as an educator.

While it can sometimes feel like a daunting task to put one together, instructors from across SFU say that the key to building an effective document is getting started, getting clear, and getting support.

According to business instructor Claudia Gomez Borquez, starting early on your dossier is key.

“We often think of a teaching dossier as a backwards-looking document, but I would challenge instructors—especially early career instructors like me—to think of it differently. I recently attended a workshop on teaching dossiers that was put on by the Centre for Educational Excellence (CEE) and putting together the components helped reveal areas where I want to start investing more. For example, I noticed I could further strengthen my contributions to academic leadership so now I have plotted out specific steps I want to take towards that. This is the power of starting to put together your teaching dossier: rather than telling the story of where I’ve been, it’s now helping guide my actions toward the future I want to create as an instructor.”

For criminology instructor Dawn Rault, developing your teaching philosophy first can help streamline the evidence collection process.

"My experience of putting together dossiers is that it can feel like putting together a puzzle that is missing a lot of pieces if I haven’t been collecting all the artefacts that I need for it. At the same time, I can’t collect everything that happens in my teaching journey because that’s an overwhelming task. What I’ve found useful has been to get clear on my teaching philosophy statement so that I can use that as my frame for knowing what artefacts to collect and what to let go of. If I am calling myself a student-centred instructor, I want to be documenting what that means. For example, the fact that I call office hours student hours, or how I provide my students with multiple ways to attend these student hours—online, face-to-face, drop in. Getting clear on what matters most has made creating this document more manageable and meaningful."

For interactive arts and technology instructor Michael Filimowicz, organization is everything.

“The key is to map the structure of your dossier. I've taught 13 unique courses and so when I was developing my dossier, I had to put a lot of thought and time into creating a structure that was easy for the committee to navigate, while avoiding the trap of oversimplification—it was important to be able to demonstrate the depth of my teaching practice. As well, the teaching dossier needed to demonstrate how I met the criteria set out in our department's renewal, tenure and promotion (RTP) documents and the collective agreement, so it was also making an argument. All of that requires very intentional design, which I created with support from an educational developer from CEE. I recommend any faculty building their dossier to reach out to them for feedback, particularly on the design aspect—so that you can ensure you are meeting those two functions.”

If you would like to learn more about building a teaching dossier, you are invited to attend the Centre for Educational Excellence workshop, Building a Great Teaching Dossier on May 28, 1:30 p.m.

For a private consultation on your teaching dossier, contact ceehelp@sfu.ca or complete their online form.