Self Presentation

Self Presentation

Teaching at UO

An instructor's self-presentation is a crucial part of the Continuous Improvement and Evaluation of Teaching system, especially how instructors are engaging to develop and refine their professional, inclusive, engaged, and research-informed teaching practices. Self-presentation materials should reflect the instructor's work in relation to UO's teaching quality standards, including the instructor's cherished goals for student learning and typical practices toward supporting students’ attainment of those goals; their efforts to develop and refine their teaching practice; and the ways they’ve shared their teaching-related insights for the good of the field, department, and university. 

Instructors have multiple opportunities to include their self-presentation materials in the teaching evaluation process:

  • Instructor Reflections: As part of the evaluation process, instructors can document their own teaching efforts in Instructor Reflections which are centrally administered for each course and included in teaching evaluation reports alongside student experience survey results. 
  • Personal Statements: A general description of the personal statement can be found on the provost's website.
  • Teaching Portfolios: TEP has a teaching portfolio page with advice on compiling a teaching portfolio, including links to examples. Your department’s evaluation procedures should detail which materials to include.
Related Topics: Teaching Evaluation
Teaching Pillars:

Self Presentation of Teaching Quality

Teaching evaluation is criteria based, so instructors will want to align their teaching to the teaching evaluation standards of professional, inclusive, engaged, and research-informed.  

The Instructor Reflection is intended to assist instructors in documenting and archiving ideas for continual course improvement as well as provide a mechanism to place instructors' own voices into the Teaching Evaluation process at the course level. It is also one way for instructors to provide evidence of Engaged Teaching for Teaching Evaluation purposes; here, "engaged teaching" is defined as “demonstrated reflective teaching practice, including through the regular revision of courses in content and pedagogy.” 

The Instructor Reflection is optional, and there are many other ways that instructors can demonstrate Engaged Teaching for the purpose of teaching evaluation (for example, in personal statements and teaching portfolios).

UO centrally administers Instructor Reflection surveys for each course; completed surveys can be accessed in CollegeNET (through DuckWeb). The results are archived for instructors to return to for the continuous improvement of their teaching, are available to evaluators in CollegeNET, and are included in Teaching Detail Reports alongside student experience survey results. You can read more about what is included in these reports on this provost webpage, which includes a description of the Teaching Detail Report generated for promotion or tenure files for career and tenure-related faculty.

We offer a detailed description of the Instructor Reflections tool; if you have additional questions, please visit our FAQ about teaching evaluations.