Teaching Portfolio

Ok, it's official. I am going to apply for at least one academic job. After some good counsel from friends in and out of academe, I have decided that it is important for me to get the experience of being on the job market, and more importantly, to begin putting myself in a position to be at the type of institution I really want to be at.

That being said, I realized today that I need to get started on my teaching portfolio. Now I've heard that these portfolios are taken in to search committees with various amounts of interest. Judging from the ad and the department website, it seems like this committee is very much interested in teaching--the ad asks for evidence of teaching including evalutations, sample student work, sample syllabi and assignments--the website indicates lots of faculty-student contact hours. Well, I realized today that some of the information I will need may have been discarded in my move--my bad. In particular, I think I chucked a lot of my qualitative evaluations (my students' brillant one-liners about my teaching were weighing down my boxes). But, I think I have enough materials to work with for the time being. Basically, I just need to get my act together, put this information in a nice package, and spruce up my teaching philosophy statement. I wrote one in the beginning of my graduate program when I first started teaching--clearly my thoughts about teaching may have evolved since then. So I have a new goal to add to the to do list--create a teaching portfolio in the next few weeks so I can some feedback before my first application deadline.

Anyone seen any really good (or really bad) examples of teaching portfolios??? I could use some advice on this one...

Enough job stuff--my obssession with checking the ads daily is growing to twice a day. I haven't done any real work today. Registered for a conference that I can't afford to attend. But mostly, I've been monitoring the work of the men installing new windows into the house. They've been here ALL day, which means unfortunately, I've been stuck inside all day too. Of course, now that they are leaving, it's starting to rain so I no longer have the desire to go outside. Sigh. Eventually, I will get back to finishing up these encyclopedia articles...I only have until MONDAY!