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GRADUATE TEACHING SUPPORT | FACULTY TEACHING SUPPORT

The Teaching Portfolio:
A Tool for Seeking Employment and the Improvement of Practice

The idea of a Teaching Portfolio grows out of the conception that teaching is an integral part of academic scholarship, which also includes research, public and professional service. A Teaching Portfolio includes both work samples of one's teaching (teaching plans, videotapes, evaluations, etc.) and reflective commentary on those samples which help explicate their meaning within a specific context.

By beginning a teaching portfolio as a graduate student, an individual gains in two very important professional areas. First, it is a very effective and comprehensive way for an individual to document what is unique about one's approach to teaching which can be used during performance evaluations and job hunting. Second, the process of building a portfolio encourages the improvement of practice because it fosters the idea that teaching is scholarly work which requires data collection and reflective analysis and synthesis of that data. The process of building a portfolio can in itself improve one's teaching.

What is Effective Teaching?
A frequently raised question both in the literature on the evaluation of teaching and in conversations with Cornell faculty is "How can we define effectiveness in teaching?" It would seem this question must be answered first before one can proceed with any kind of evaluation. The problem with this question is that it may not be answerable in absolute terms. A major reason there has not been a useful and parsimonious definition of teaching effectiveness is that teaching may be too broad a concept to be limited by a single definition. Teaching undergraduates will involve different criteria than the context of teaching graduate students. The criteria for effectiveness in teaching to be considered for promotion to full professor will necessarily be different from those for consideration at the associate professor level. Effectiveness in teaching will vary by discipline, course design and level of experience. A more useful way of thinking about teaching effectiveness is in relative terms: to what degree has improvement in practice revealed an individual's capacity for growth and development.

Improvement of teaching is the result of an integration of refinements in how teachers think about teaching, what their beliefs are in terms of how they can influence student learning, what they have come to know and understand based on experience and experimentation in action, and the degree to which they see teaching as an important part of their scholarly work which is connected to research. As such, teaching development will be manifested on several levels and the criteria used to measure that development must encompass cognitive, attitudinal, value and behavioral indices. Relying on a single indicator or data source such as student evaluations is not sufficient. Improvement may not always be indicated by a standard deviation in higher student evaluation scores. Students are not able to evaluate the improvement of a course design since they are only involved with it once. Students are also incapable of judging the improvement of a course's substance new ways of explaining and presenting complex ideas and conceptual structures.

Purposes of Evaluation
In the literature on the evaluation of teaching there has been a tradition of distinguishing two forms of evaluation: summative evaluation made for personnel decisions like tenure and promotion, and formative evaluation conducted for the improvement of practice.¹ A framework for summative evaluation of teaching is included in Figure 1 below:

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Last updated:
30-Nov-2006