"A teaching portfolio is a coherent set of materials including work samples and reflective commentary on them compiled by a faculty member to represent his or her teaching practice as related to student learning and development."
Cerbin and Hutchings. 1994. "Teaching as Community Property: the Power of the Teaching Portfolio." AAHE conference on Faculty Roles and Rewards. New Orleans, Jan. 28-30, 1994.
The teaching portfolio is gaining national attention as a developmental, reflective, and evaluative tool for teachers and administrators. The rationale for having teaching portfolios is that they can:
- Provide evidence of teaching. Display better, more authentic, more robust (which is not to say foolproof or 'scientific') evidence of teaching -- for reflection, discussion, evaluation.
- Increase professional accountability. Put faculty in charge of monitoring, improving, ensuring the quality of teaching: professional accountability.
- Increase reflection and discussion.
- Prompt individual and collective reflection and discussion of teaching purposes, strategies, results, standards.
- Foster a culture of teaching and learning. Cultivate a culture in which teaching and learning are valued, talked about, inquired into, and continuously improved. (#1-4 from Cerbin and Hutchings, 1994)
- Support faculty self-definition. Allow faculty member to have control over their teaching, to define themselves, and to indicate how they intend to grow as teachers.
- Provide the reader with insight. Give readers of the teaching portfolio a sense of what the faculty member is thinking about teaching
- University contribution. Contribute to continued development and excellence in education at the University.
The Faculty Council on Instructional Quality (FCIQ) would like to provide two sets of simple, general guidelines for preparation and use of teaching portfolios to departments campus-wide: one set of guidelines for developmental purposes and one for evaluative purposes (promotion and tenure).
Consultation and model portfolios are available at the Center for Instructional Development and Research (CIDR). It is highly recommended that faculty work with mentors in their department to initially prepare the portfolio. For assisting with portfolio development and reflection, an effective mentor is not necessarily someone in an evaluative relationship with the faculty member but is thoughtfully chosen as a colleague interested in helping develop teaching competence.
Based on feedback received from colleagues both in and outside of UW, the following represents reasonable goals when preparing the teaching portfolio:
- The reflective self-statement should be understandable to someone outside of the specific academic field.
- The reflective statement should be self-explanatory, with all other documentation providing supportive evidence.
- The portfolio should be tailored to each specific usage: developmental (improvement) vs. evaluative (promotion/tenure/merit increase).
More Information on Teaching Portfolios
