NUTSHELL NOTES

"Teaching tips in a nutshell" - The University of Colorado
at Denver's One-page Newsletter for Teaching Excellence
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Volume 2 Number 8 

TEACHING PORTFOLIOS - I — DOCUMENTING SUCCESS and PROGRESS

When I attended my first Colorado Board of Regents meeting, the issue of "how much" and "how hard" professors work, especially how they spent their time in teaching, was being addressed by a recent poll of a few faculty. All faculty certainly knew that the demands on their time were much different than what was portrayed by some vocal legislators and angry editorial writers, but we found ourselves having to scramble in a last-minute "poll" to document the facts. The need for this scramble arose because we had not been documenting our teaching accomplishments to the same clear-cut degree to which we documented our research and publication accomplishments. In that respect, UCD was not unusual among other higher education institutions, but some other institutions have found that teaching portfolios are an effective way to document effort, success, and progress in teaching, and can even be a means to improve teaching. This issue of Nutshell Notes introduces the portfolio concept. My purpose in this month's issues is to allow readers to become aware of the teaching portfolio and its uses.

The teaching portfolio is a concise compilation that presents a professor's teaching philosophy and documents his or her activities, strengths, and accomplishments. It usually takes the form of an organized narrative of a few pages that must be read by review committees, followed by a set of appendices for optional reference that provide more detailed documentation.

The portfolio concept was born out of the need to provide a clear documentation of teaching as a scholarly activity. The portfolio has an advantage by documenting teaching quality and success from a variety of sources, including samples of student work, syllabi, formalized structured efforts at improvement, and educational endeavors that take place outside of class. In particular, it forces review committees, chairs and deans to look at a file of evidence rather than rely exclusively on numerical summaries from student ratings. Virtually all recent research has determined that an exclusive reliance on student ratings is a poor, and perhaps lazy, approach to teaching evaluation.

As a means to improve teaching, the process of compiling a portfolio encourages us to set aside some time to think about our teaching, to consider alternative approaches for reaching our students, to decide why certain practices have proven "good" for us, and to consider how and why our own approaches to teaching have matured and changed with time. Further, the act of creating a portfolio is often structured as an exercise done in collaboration with another peer, and the insights of another supportive colleague tend to broaden our awareness and break the isolation that many of us established by following, without much reflection, the tradition of exclusively structuring our teaching in private.

In workshops given on teaching portfolios, one of the most common exclamations that faculty members make is "I see that I haven't been giving myself enough credit for a lot of the way I spend my time!" This echoes a certain frustration we may have with our chairs or deans when we feel we don't get enough credit or positive reinforcement for the long hours we spent at our teaching, particularly after months characterized by working late nights and weekends. A reason we don't get due credit may be because our conventional methods of review simply didn't encourage us to keep good records or allow us to bring efforts to the attention of reviewers. The teaching portfolio approach tends to rewrite the contract about "what effort counts" by including a broader context as part of the evaluation process.

What kinds of materials enter a teaching portfolio? A more detailed list of useful entries will appear in the next issue, but, these can be broadly classified into the following:

  1. Materials from ourselves, including a perspective of our responsibilities, our goals, our central philosophy about teaching, and a summary of efforts that we have taken to enhance our own success in teaching.
  2. Materials from others, including student evaluation data, and colleagues' statements who have observed us or worked with us.
  3. Products of good teaching, that include evidence of our students' success in subsequent courses, in graduate school, in carrers or in scores on regional or national examinations.


    4. Reference: Seldin, P., 1993, Successful Use of Teaching Portfolios: Bolton, MA, Anker Pub., 212 p. 


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