Anticipating a variety of advantages, many faculty look for ways to document
their activities and achievements as teachers. Such records can serve as
part of a departmental archive of good teaching practice, a catalyst for
conversations about teaching with faculty colleagues and, at key career
points, as evidence for scholarship as expressed in teaching activities.
While City College does not formally require candidates for promotion and
tenure to present detailed evidence of teaching accomplishments, draft proposals
to enact such a requirement are under consideration. This future prospect,
along with other potential gains, should persuade faculty to begin the process
of documenting this dimension of their scholarly work more completely.
One approach to representing teaching activity that many institutions and
individuals have adopted is the teaching portfolio. Comparable in concept
to the artist's portfolio, the teaching portfolio is expected to be a representation
of the faculty member's best work as a teacher. Whether a component of
a scholar's portfolio, which also includes research and service, or a stand-alone
document, the portfolio provides a record of teaching products and, ideally,
the faculty member's reflections on representative teaching materials.
Teaching portfolios have at least two advantages compared to many other
commonly used approaches: (1) they return primary responsibility for documenting
teaching back into the hands of the faculty member and (2) they usually
are designed in a way which promotes dialogue about teaching between faculty.
By sharing portfolios, both modeling and mentoring by master teachers is
facilitated.
The experiences of other colleges and research conducted by the Stanford
Teaching Project argue for a portfolio structure which consists of a small
number of samples of teaching activity under several different categories.
This recommendation for brevity is based on research on use of teaching
portfolios in personnel actions which indicates that reviewers generally
draw conclusions after examining a small number of work examples. Even
as a basis for conversations about teaching with colleagues, a few carefully
selected samples of work function more effectively than a boxful of course
materials. The portfolio development strategy that we prefer rests on two
assumptions: (1) that good teaching is highly situational, involving the
transformation of knowledge in response to the special characteristics of
the students and learning environment and, as a consequence, (2) the portfolio
must represent specific instances of teaching, preferably accompanied by
brief explanations or other reflective comments added by the faculty member
to add perspective to work samples.
The Teaching Initiative project of the American Association of Higher
Education suggests a simple and flexible outline to guide portfolio development:
Part I includes information from the faculty member. This section begins
with a standard curriculum vitae and is followed by a relatively brief statement
by the faculty member highlighting the key stages in their development as
teachers. What follows in Part I is the heart of the portfolio: individual
entries, each accompanied by a reflective statement by the faculty member,
and organized according to the four core tasks of a professor:
Task Possible Types of Entries
Course planning & Syllabi, assignments, lecture notes preparation Actual teaching Notes from a colleague who visits class, a video, student journals Evaluating student Tests and other major evaluative assignments, learning & providing including copies of graded papers with instructor feedback comments Keeping up in the Notes or papers from professional meetings professional field in areas related to teaching performance
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