A teaching dossier is a professional document that describes your approach to teaching, demonstrates how you support student learning, and provides evidence of your teaching effectiveness. At the University of Toronto (U of T), teaching dossiers are commonly used in academic review processes, including tenure, continuing status, promotion, teaching awards, and employment applications.
A teaching dossier also serves as a reflective document, helping you articulate your teaching goals, examine your practices, and document your ongoing development as an educator. It brings together two interconnected elements:
- Narrative: Your interpretation of your teaching practice. The narrative explains what you value in teaching and learning, why you make particular instructional choices, and how those choices support student learning. It connects the different components of your dossier into a coherent account of your teaching.
- Evidence: The materials and information that support the claims made in your narrative. Evidence may include student feedback, peer observations, course evaluations, teaching materials, and examples of student learning. These sources help demonstrate how your teaching values are reflected in practice and what impacts your teaching has had.
Narrative and evidence work together. Your narrative gives meaning and context to the evidence, while the evidence supports the claims you make about your teaching. Together, they help communicate the connections among your teaching values, practices, and impacts on student learning. A strong dossier selects and interprets evidence purposefully rather than simply compiling documents.
CTSI’s Teaching Dossier Guide is the primary resource for faculty members preparing or refining a teaching dossier at U of T. This self-paced guide provides in-depth guidance on institutional expectations, developing the six dossier components, and strengthening the clarity, coherence, and continuity of your dossier.
Understanding Teaching Dossiers at U of T
Teaching dossiers vary across disciplines, divisions, and academic review processes. At U of T, Provostial Guidelines establish broad principles for evaluating teaching effectiveness, while Divisional Guidelines specify the criteria, procedures, and expectations within each division.
Before preparing your dossier, review the institutional policies and guidelines relevant to your appointment and review process:
- Relevant Policies for Appointed Faculty on the Academic Administrative Procedures Manual (AAPM)
- Policy and Procedures on Academic Appointments (PPAA)
- Policy and Procedures Governing Promotions (PPP)
- Policy and Procedures Governing Promotions in the Teaching Stream (PPPTS)
- Provostial Guidelines for Developing Written Assessments of Effectiveness of Teaching in Promotion and Tenure Decisions
- Divisional Teaching Evaluation Guidelines
Your Divisional Guidelines are especially important, as they carry the weight of policy and identify the criteria used to evaluate teaching in your division. Expectations may differ depending on your academic rank, career stage, and whether the review requires demonstration of competence or excellence in teaching.
Consulting with Your Unit Head and Colleagues
Consult your unit head early in the dossier preparation process to clarify departmental expectations, disciplinary conventions, required components, submission formats, and timelines. These conversations can also help you understand how your teaching will be evaluated and what evidence will be most relevant.
You may also find it helpful to speak with mentors or colleagues who have recently completed a similar review process.
Teaching and learning centres across U of T, including CTSI, offer consultations to support the development and refinement of teaching dossiers.
Getting Started with Your Teaching Dossier
Developing a teaching dossier is more manageable when you collect and reflect on your teaching materials throughout your academic career, rather than assembling everything immediately before a review.
Collecting and Organizing Teaching Materials
Maintain a collection of materials that document your teaching responsibilities, practices, accomplishments, and development. These might include:
- Course syllabi, lecture materials, assignments, assessments, and rubrics.
- Course evaluation results, mid-course feedback, and other student feedback.
- Peer observation reports and feedback from colleagues.
- Examples of student work and learning achievements, where appropriate and with necessary permissions.
- Documentation of course development, curriculum initiatives, and educational innovations.
- Records of teaching-related professional development, mentorship, and educational leadership.
Organize these materials in a way that allows you to retrieve and review them easily. Over time, you can identify representative examples that best illustrate your teaching values, practices, and impacts.
Documenting Your Teaching as You Teach
Consider maintaining a teaching journal, log, or other reflective record. Brief notes taken during or after a course can help you:
- Record observations about student learning and engagement.
- Document instructional decisions, teaching innovations, and changes made in response to feedback.
- Reflect on teaching challenges and strategies you might explore.
- Identify examples that illustrate your teaching philosophy and professional development.
These reflections can help you recognize patterns in your teaching and provide concrete examples for your dossier.
Core Components of a Teaching Dossier
Although teaching dossiers vary across disciplines and review processes, most include six common components. Together, these components communicate your teaching values, how they shape your practices, and the impacts of those practices on student learning.
The following components offer a sample table of contents for a teaching dossier. Consult your unit head and relevant divisional guidelines to confirm the organization and requirements appropriate to your context.
For more in-depth guidance on each component, consult Part 2 of the Teaching Dossier Guide.
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
Articulates your teaching values, how those values shape your practices, and their impacts on student learning. A teaching philosophy provides the foundation for a reflective narrative that connects the different components of your dossier.
Teaching Dossier Guide: Section 2.2 Statement of Teaching Philosophy. See also CTSI’s Developing a Statement of Teaching Philosophy resource.
Teaching Responsibilities
Describes the scope and context of your teaching, including courses, supervision, mentorship, and curricular contributions. This component helps reviewers understand what you teach, whom you teach, and how your teaching values take shape in practice.
Teaching Dossier Guide: Section 2.3 Teaching Responsibilities.
Evidence of Teaching Effectiveness
Demonstrates how your teaching values and practices contribute to student learning and development. Draw on multiple sources of evidence and explain what they reveal about your teaching, how you have responded to feedback, and what impacts your practices have had.
Teaching Dossier Guide: Section 2.4 Evidence of Teaching Effectiveness.
Educational Leadership and/or Achievement
Highlights contributions that extend beyond your own teaching to support teaching and learning within your department, discipline, institution, or broader educational community. These may include curriculum initiatives, mentoring colleagues, educational innovation, and leadership in teaching-related activities.
Teaching Dossier Guide: Section 2.5 Educational Leadership and/or Achievement.
Pedagogical Professional Development
Documents your engagement in ongoing learning about teaching and how that learning informs your practice. This may include participation in workshops, programs, conferences, scholarly activities, or other professional learning opportunities.
Teaching Dossier Guide: Section 2.6 Pedagogical Professional Development.
Appendices
Provide a curated collection of supplementary materials that support and illustrate your teaching narrative. These may include sample assignments, assessment rubrics, course materials, feedback summaries, and other relevant artifacts. Select materials purposefully and refer to them within the main body of your dossier.
Teaching Dossier Guide: Section 2.7 Appendices.
Understanding Evidence of Teaching Effectiveness
Evidence of teaching effectiveness is an essential component of a teaching dossier. It helps demonstrate how your teaching practices contribute to student learning, engagement, and development.
Teaching effectiveness is multidimensional and cannot be demonstrated through a single measure. Drawing on multiple sources provides a more balanced and credible account of your teaching. Student feedback provides important insight into students’ experiences of learning, but should be interpreted in context and considered alongside other forms of evidence rather than treated as a direct measure of teaching effectiveness.
Possible sources of evidence include:
- Student-generated feedback: Mid-course feedback, end-of-term course evaluations, and other student reflections that provide insight into students’ learning experiences.
- Peer and institutional feedback: Teaching observation reports, feedback from colleagues or mentors, and recognition of teaching effectiveness.
- Evidence of student learning: Examples of student work, assessment results, learning outcomes, and student achievements that illustrate learning and development.
- Assessment and feedback practices: Rubrics, assignment designs, and examples of feedback that demonstrate how you support student learning and progress.
- Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL): Evidence from systematic inquiry into teaching and learning, including classroom research, analysis of learning outcomes, and pedagogical scholarship.
When selecting evidence, consider what it demonstrates about your teaching and how it supports the claims made in your narrative. Interpret evidence in context, taking into account factors such as course level, class size, disciplinary expectations, and changes in your teaching over time.
Evidence should not simply be presented; it should be interpreted. Explain what the evidence shows, why it matters, and how it has informed your teaching practices or professional development.
Summarizing Course Evaluation Data
Course evaluations are one source of evidence of teaching effectiveness. When including quantitative course evaluation results, consider presenting a summary that helps reviewers identify patterns and interpret results across courses or over time.
The optional CTSI Course Evaluation Summary Sheet (xlsx) can help organize numerical results in a clear tabular format. The Teaching Dossier Guide also provides accompanying instructions (PDF) and a short video guide (5:56) explaining how to complete the template.
Course evaluation data should be interpreted alongside other sources of evidence and in relation to your teaching context. Consult your Divisional Guidelines for any specific requirements concerning course evaluation reporting and presentation.
For more in-depth guidance on selecting, interpreting, and presenting evidence, consult Section 2.4 Evidence of Teaching Effectiveness in the Teaching Dossier Guide.
Refining and Maintaining Your Teaching Dossier
A teaching dossier should present a clear, coherent, and evidence-informed account of your teaching. As you develop or revise your dossier, consider how its components work together and how the document can remain useful throughout your academic career.
Strengthening Clarity and Coherence
Ensure that the different components of your dossier contribute to a connected teaching narrative. Your teaching philosophy should articulate the values reflected in your teaching responsibilities, while your evidence of effectiveness should demonstrate the impacts of those practices.
Balance description with analysis. Explain not only what you do, but why you make particular teaching decisions, how they support student learning, and what you have learned through your experiences.
Select evidence strategically and avoid unnecessary repetition. Each component and supporting artifact should contribute to the overall account of your teaching.
Presenting an Accessible Teaching Dossier
Clear organization and accessible document design help reviewers navigate and understand your dossier.
- Use a logical structure with descriptive headings and consistent formatting.
- Apply built-in heading styles to support document navigation and accessibility.
- Use clear, direct language and explain specialized terms where necessary.
- Provide meaningful hyperlink text, alternative text for images, and appropriate labels for tables and figures.
- Ensure sufficient colour contrast and avoid relying on colour alone to communicate information.
- Use your document editor’s accessibility checker to identify and address potential barriers.
- If submitting your dossier as a PDF, ensure that accessibility features are preserved during conversion and check the final PDF for accessibility.
For additional guidance, consult CTSI’s UDL Express: SLIDE into Document Accessibility resources.
Maintaining Your Dossier Over Time
Treat your teaching dossier as a living document that evolves alongside your teaching practice. Regularly collect new materials, update evidence, and revisit your teaching philosophy and professional goals.
Consider reviewing your dossier once per semester or year to identify new accomplishments, document changes in your teaching, and ensure that your narrative and evidence remain aligned.
Maintaining your dossier over time can make future review processes more manageable while supporting ongoing reflection and professional growth.
For more in-depth guidance, consult Part 3 Refining Your Teaching Dossier: Clarity, Coherence, and Continuity in the Teaching Dossier Guide.
Support and Additional Resources
CTSI and teaching and learning centres across U of T offer consultations and resources to support teaching dossier preparation. These services can assist with articulating your teaching philosophy, organizing materials, selecting evidence, and strengthening the clarity and coherence of your dossier.
- Teaching Dossier Guide: In-depth self-paced guidance on developing, refining, and maintaining a teaching dossier at U of T.
- Divisional Teaching Evaluation Guidelines: Divisional guidance on the evaluation of teaching effectiveness.
- Teaching Dossier Consultations: Individualized support for preparing or revising teaching dossier materials.
- Divisional Teaching and Learning Support: Additional consultations and resources available through campus and divisional teaching and learning centres.