Thank you for taking the time to look at my portfolio. This portfolio is a compilation of items that I feel represent the breadth of my experiences and influences that can speak to where I am in my career today. The contents are the products of both my professional and academic lives of the past several years which will hopefully give the reader a clear idea of who I am as a teacher of English to speakers of other languages. Through assembling these materials I have been afforded the unique opportunity to step back and survey what I have accomplished and where I am headed, and sharing that is something that I am pleased to be able to do.

The first item that you will encounter in this portfolio is my curriculum vitae, which focuses solely on my professional achievements thus far in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. The draft presented here is my current C.V. and I have found that each time I update it I am able to monitor my growth in my profession. However, more significantly, I have been able to track the broadening spectrum of my experiences and interests. I have discovered that I have a passion for both English teaching and leadership, and my C.V. is beginning to reflect those passions as I gain more and more valuable experiences in those fields, which I hope to continue in the future.

Following my C.V. is my Teaching Philosophy which I have created in an effort to articulate, to the best of my ability, the complex view that I take on teaching. In this paper you will see how I have been able to organize my beliefs about what drives me to do what I do in my profession and why. Included in this paper are also abundant examples from my teaching that reflect my stated beliefs and which allow the reader a glimpse into my classrooms. I have incorporated this narrative into my portfolio as a window into the more internal and also practical aspects of my teaching that inform my daily practice. Through the experience of attempting to communicate my beliefs about teaching I have found that I sincerely value self-reflection and the sense of purposeful action in the classroom. Putting my beliefs on paper has allowed me to explore these aspects of my professional life and also to connect them to my personal self in a very genuine way.

The next item you will find is a professional bibliography that reveals some of the research most relevant to my own teaching approach. I have provided the reader with both summaries and reactions to all entries in order to illustrate both the stimuli for my thoughts and the responses I have had to them. I feel I have been successful in adapting ideas from the scholars cited and feel also that by continuing my research I will be able to further my own knowledge and teaching expertise.

The teaching materials I have chosen to include in this portfolio are some that I feel are representative of my teaching in both Oral Communication Skills and Listening, and also Grammar. When I initially planned these lessons I had the teaching principles I had learned about in mind, but I now see that I was able to incorporate them in many ways that I feel proud of sharing.

Next you will find the link to my recent publication in CATESOL News that covers strategies for increasing positive affect among students in intensive English programs.

The final component of my portfolio is an abstract and handout that accompanied my presentation at the M.A. TESOL Conference on May 8th, 2009. This presentation grew out of findings from my own original research and exemplifies some of the research interests that I hope to continue pursuing in the future.