Introduction to Teaching Portfolios

An overview of the purpose of portfolios in evaluating teaching and their format.

Why a Portfolio?

For those who value good teaching, portfolios offer a means to promote better teaching and to document teaching achievement.

Teaching portfolios have gained a higher profile in recent years as a creative form of summarizing and developing stronger teaching. For those who may be dissatisfied with the limitations of standardized forms for evaluating teaching through student evaluations, for example, the portfolio offers an important alternative. For some, they are merely part of a broader academic or career portfolio, showing how teaching, research and service are all integrated. (This website focuses exclusively on teaching portfolios.)

Teaching portfolios--and the process of creating or revising one--can have many benefits or roles:

One may well view teaching portfolios as parallel to the more familiar process of presenting one's research achievements. After all, it is appropriate to view Teaching as a Scholarly Activity. So, too, is documenting it and sharing it. These reflective and communal activities are a form of personal growth. Ideally, then, one might see the teaching portfolio as an extension of one's curriculum vitae (CV). (The perspective at this website is thus much closer in spirit to discussions at AAHE than to the popular books by Seldin, 1993; 1997.)

In this site, we will highlight portfolios as creative acts, as forms of self- expression in the professional context of teaching. As scholar-teachers, we should be central actors in reviewing and presenting our work, rather than passive objects of evaluation.

In addition, we will emphasize the process of developing a portfolio as a tool for guiding self-improvement as much as for evaluating performance.

Portfolios are messy to construct, cumbersome to store, difficult to score, and vulnerable to misrepresentation. But in ways that no other assessment can, portfolios prove a connection to the contexts and personal histories that characterize real teaching and make it possible to document the unfolding of both teaching and learning over time
— Lee Shulman (1988)

Summative and Formative

Portfolios can be multi-purposed. Along one dimension, they can address an administrative need to summarize one's teaching contribution in a teaching institution: a form of summative evaluation. Along another axis, one can use the assembly or development of a portfolio as an occasion for self-reflection and growth: a formative evaluation. In teaching, as in research, we may profit from blurring the distinction, or seeing the two as complementary, not antithetical. In our site, we highlight both summative and formative aspects, though our emphasis is on articulating the less familiar formative dimension and its potentially vital role in summative evaluation. (For more, see Formative and Summative Evaluation.)

A Portfolio Profile

Fundamentally, a teaching protfolio is similar to an artist's portfolio: a sampling of the breadth, depth and quality of one's work, in order to convey one's abilities, strengths or style, and achievements. But unlike an artist's portfolio, it must display work indirectly, through descriptions, documents and various forms of evidence.

You may also peruse a cross-section of other views and definitions:

Content

Depending on one's aim, the contents of a teaching portfolio might include any of the following:

Elements denoted by a star (*) are considered here as the core of an effective portfolio, especially for the first version.

The Central Role of Teaching Philosophy

What characterizes good or effective teaching? That depends, in part, on how one frames the aims or goals of education. Thus, defining the ends of education is perhaps the first step in reflecting on teaching. But who determines these ends, and on what authority or with what justification?

One approach is to articulate a consensus on a set of goals that all teachers might share in common. But there can be healthy disagreement about what constitutes a good education and thus what characterizes good teaching. For example, are we training students for better-paying jobs, or are we educating them in a more classical, liberal arts sense? Is the ideal product a skilled technician or a reflective thinker, or necessarily a combination of both? What should be the product of our educational efforts? A model for our approach to establishing standards might well come from other realms of academic discourse and the tradition of academic freedom. One dimension of academic freedom is the privilege and responsibility (both) of defining or characterizing one's position on the goals of education. Hence, the starting point for anyone assessing his or her teaching through a portfolio is to characterize its ends in a statement of teaching philosophy.

By considering educational philosophy fully, teaching becomes grounded in a purpose deeper than what might be described, more plainly, as one's teaching responsibilities. Here, the goal of developing a description of one's philosophy or pedagogical goals is a movement towards more meaningful teaching. It is an essential tool for clarifying one's actions, and the roles and responsibilities that one adopts. At the same time, the scope of education is appropriately broadened beyond mere classroom encounters. One can more easily see mentoring, research guidance, extracurricular forums, etc., as integral components of education. Teaching need not be equated with "courses taught."

Documentation and Interpretation

One aim of a portfolio, then, is to document one's teaching. This means collecting and assembling various forms of relevant information or evidence. One can be imaginative about sources -- even creating new tools (as in any research) to collect information that may be helpful.

As any academic knows, however, evidence does not speak for itself. Hence, any volume of material -- no matter how vast or impressive -- needs interpretation. One needs to reduce the raw data, note patterns, synthesize divergent sources of information, highlight significant features, etc.

Format

The format of a portfolio may vary considerably. For a portfolio to be effective, though, it must be informative and well organized. The American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) suggests that a teaching portfolio should be:

These are addressed further in the sections below.

Structure

Consider how a portfolio can communicate important traits through its organization, creativity, thoroughness and neatness. Again, assembling a portfolio is a creative act and expresses the author's abilities and style.

In an adminstrative context, a portfolio document becomes more valuable (or perhaps more efficient) if there are clear expectations or frameworks that can serve as a structure or scaffolding for building a portfolio. At UTEP, we are just beginning to discuss and characterize these categories in the context of our institution. We encourage you to contribute to the discussion. At present, this site is organized under three broad categories:

  1. Professional Reflection -- includes teaching philosophy, methods and scope of responsiblities adopted -- crudely, why and how you teach.

  2. Evidence (or Feedback) -- includes the familiar student course evaluations, but also other forms of student feedback, information from peers and others, along with an analysis of products of teaching -- largely a retrospective analysis of your effectiveness, given your own goals.

  3. Professional Development -- includes evidence of professional growth, expansion of teaching resources and future plans -- largely a prospective view of your plans and continued potential for growth.

Scope: Selective or Exhaustive?

Particularly where one aims to document one's achievement in teaching, the initial tendency is often to be exhaustive -- to document everything, lest some important element be omitted. On the other hand, if a portfolio is to be read -- either by a peer or an administrator -- it must be readable. While being comprehensive, it must also be concise. A portfolio is not an archive, though it may be built from one and refer to it. As artists, photographers and architects know, a portfolio is selective.

Consider, for example, a familiar academic document: the grant proposal. In this case, a vast amount of information must be concentrated and presently cogently and persuasively in a limited amount of pages that can be reviewed effectively. Where appropriate, of course, well organized appendices may provide supplemental information or evidence. When the portfolio serves as a vehicle for decision regarding tenure or promotion, it becomes an argumentative device, much like many scholarly papers. All information should be meaningfully interpeted and relevant. Authors may reflect on how their argument and evidence are consolidated or well focused--and how their skills in assembling a portfolio themselves reflect on their skills in assembling and presenting evidence.

In research publications, it is customary not to cite failures. Hence, by analogy, one may well refrain from profiling in a portfolio the areas where teaching skills are underdeveloped or need improvement. Whether a portfolio should be selective by showing only one's best work (see also "Representativeness" below), however, is still a subject of debate. Occasional failures may reflect a spirit of innovation and can be viewed poisitively if they lead to subsequent improvement or reflection on goals for professional development.

Concrete recommendations on length vary considerably across different institutions. Texas A&M University and Seldin (1997), for example, suggest limiting a portfolio to ten pages based on experience (well, would you want to read more than that?). Here, we will assume that different individuals, even at the same institution (colleague, departmental teaching committee, department chair, dean, provost), will likely be inclined to read the same portfolio at varying levels of depth. Hence, the portfolio might be designed in layers to accommodate different readers -- as a document whose length expands or contracts, depending on the reader. Alternatively, a base portfolio might be organized flexibly or in modules that can be adapted and re-assembled to suit given circumstances.

Scope: Representativeness

While a portfolio as a portfolio must be selective, it must usually be comprehensive, as well. Its scope must reflect achievement or work as wide as one's responsibilities. Hence, one should address an effective cross-section of one's teaching, not merely a "selective" glimpse of a specialized subsection of one's work.

A portfolio may be an occasion to celebrate past achievements. On such occasions, a focus on one's most outstanding accomplishments may be appropriate. At other times, the focus may be on demonstrating potential for the future, or on sharing one's achievements for others to apply. In these circumstances, the emphasis may be on general skills, strategies or habits. That is, one might strive towards addressing patterns of skills or behavior, not the exceptional episodes. Again, this may require the creative synthesis of material.

On-Going Process

One aim of a portfolio is to promote reflective practice in teaching. Thus, the product of that thinking will itself be constantly changing. One should expect to add to and revise one's portfolio on a regular basis. Having a file for collecting material to review periodically is one way to ensure that the portfolio becomes a process, not just an idle snapshot. A recent AAHE document proposes, in fact, that "reflective practice and improvement should be a part of what we mean by (and evaluate and reward in) good teaching."

Guidance: Standards and Samples

Consider once again the artist's portfolio. It may follow certain patterns of content and format, but there are no rules set in stone. Therefore, while this document characterizes what a portfolio might be, it is only a guide. What common standards or frameworks will apply at UTEP will ultimately result only from faculty discussion on evaluating teaching.

One source of guidance is through exemplars. One develops understanding through viewing other people's work and participating in the process. We have assembled links to some samples online.

A separate section on this site considers how we might begin Reviewing and Evaluating Portfolios.

Finally, note that our collective vision of portfolios (at UTEP and in the Academy, more broadly), like the individual portfolios themselves, will likely evolve.

See Also...

More Information...

Further introductions to teaching portfolios at:

Bibliography

Edgerton, Russell, Pat Hutchings, and Kathleen Quinlan. 1991. The Teaching Portfolio: Capturing the Scholarship in Teaching. Washington, DC: American Association for Higher Education.
------a landmark on the role of teaching portfolios and the scholarly role of teaching itself.

Hutchings, Pat. 1993. Making Teaching Community Property: A Menu for Peer Collaboration and Peer Review. Washington, DC: American Association for Higher Education.
-------a provocative collection of essays on the role of teaching communities in promoting and evaluating good teaching.

Seldin, Peter and Associates. 1993. Successful Use of Teaching Portfolios. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing.
-------largely parallel to Seldin (1997)...

Seldin, Peter. 1997. The Teaching Portfolio: A Practical Guide to Improved Perfomance and Promotion/Tenure Decisions, 2d. ed., Bolton, MA: Anker.
-------a standard benchmark and reference.

Lyons, Nona (ed.). 1998. With Portfolio in Hand: Validating the New Teacher Professionalism. New York: Teachers College Press.
-------recent views deepening discussion.

Anderson, Erin (ed.). 1993. Campus Use of the Teaching Portfolio: Twenty-five Profiles. Washington, D.C.: AAHE.
-------how different institutions have adapted the concept.

Journal on Excellence in College Teaching Vol 6, No 1 (1995).
-------special issue devoted to teaching portfolios. Abstracts online.

Handbooks (some online)

O'Neil. Carol and Alan Wright. 1997. Recording Teaching Accomplishment: A Dalhousie Guide to the Teaching Dossier, 5th ed. Halifax, NS: Dalhousie University Office of Instructional Development and Technology. ($6 + $3 shipping)
------- Part I (pp.1-26) provides a well articulated overview of the context and rationale for portfolios as scholarly documents.

Rodruguez-Farrar, Hannelore B. 1997. The Teaching Portfolio: A Handbook for Faculty, Teaching Asistants and Teaching Fellows. Providence, RI: Brown University Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning. (20pp.)

Way, David (ed.). 1993. Teaching Evaluation Handbook, 2d ed. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Office of Instructional Support.

Shore, Bruce, et al. 1991. The Teaching Dossier: Its Preparation and Use. Ottawa, ON: Canadian Association of University Teachers. ($4)

Teaching Portfolios