Sandbox:E-Portfolios
Why Create an e-Portfolio?
The teaching portfolio can serve many purposes, some of which include the following:
- Reflecting on your goals as a teacher
- Assessing your teaching strengths and areas which need improvement
- Documenting your progress as a teacher* Identifying your personal teaching style
- Generating ideas for future teaching/course development
- Using elements of the portfolio to promote dialogue with fellow teachers
- Considering new ways of gathering student feedback* Gathering detailed data to support your goals
- Collecting multiple sources of evidence that document the implementation of your teaching goals and their success
- One would use a portfolio during the academic job search, promotion and tenure process, and for personal and professional development.
What is an e-Portfolio
- Definition: Personalized web-based collections of work, responses to work and reflections that are used to demonstrate key skills and accomplishments for a variety of contexts and time periods
Lorenzo & Ittelson 2005
What is driving the growth of teaching portfolios in Higher Education?
- External demands for faculty accountability around teaching
- Growing emphasis on teaching as a scholarly practice
- Pressure from administrators and faculty to comprehensively evaluate their teaching
What is a teaching portfolio?
A reflective, evidence-based collection of materials that documents teaching, research, and service performance. Seldin (2009)
The teaching portfolio is both a process and a product. It is at once the receptacle for evidence of achievement in teaching and the means for teachers to discern ways to achieve more. Herteis (2004)
A development process
Reflect-Describe-Select
- Reflect on your teaching philosophy, goals and approaches
- Describe the strategies and methodologies that flow from that reflection (why you do what you do)
- Select documents and materials that provided evidence
Collaborative
It is valuable to collaborate on your teaching portfolio as part of developing it.
- Mentoring: Developing teaching portfolios through a mentorship process assists in engaging in critical reflection and ensures that the document and appendix are cohesive and clearly articulated. Mentors can include: colleagues, department heads, faculty development experts
- Discussing expectations: In developing your teaching portfolio it is essential to discuss overall expectations with the department chair or head in charge of evaluating the teaching portfolios. Through this interchange instructors can gain a sense of the elements to include, the approach to take when developing the document the amount and type of data to include.
- The following questions described by Peter Seldin (2009) are a good starting point for this discussion
- What does the institution expect of the faculty in terms of teaching, research, scholarship and service?
- What evidence of successful performance-both quantity and quality-is considered appropriate for each activity?
- How much evidence is enough?
- What are effective and appropriate ways to report the evidence?
What Goes Into A Teaching Portfolio
Teaching philosophy statement
Philosophy of teaching statements are concise statements of what you believe about teaching and learning. Your teaching philosophy statement is reflective, personal, and normally written as a narrative. This statement is generally between one and two pages in length.
- Questions for reflection
- What are your goals with respect to student learning?
- How would you describe the atmosphere in your classroom? How do you think your students would describe it?
- How do you help students to learn?
- What steps do you take to encourage higher level learning (such as synthesis, analysis, application, problem-solving, etc.)?
- What skills and values do you bring to the instructional aspect of your job?
- What is active learning and how do you use it in the classroom and in assignments?
- In which ways has your teaching changed in the last five years? Are they changes for the better (for you, for your students)? Explain.
- What qualities would you like to be remembered by as a teacher?
Teaching Activities
- Teaching responsibilities:
- Titles and numbers of courses taught, including graduate, undergraduate, and reading courses. You may wish to briefly highlight those courses that you have developed or substantially revised.
- Actual teaching methods used in the classroom (e.g., collaborative inquiry, problem-based learning, case studies, lecture, small group discussion, problem-solving, project-based, student presentations or other critical thinking pedagogies)
- Sample: Don G. Wardell (click Courses then Teaching Responsibilities and Evaluations)
- Supervising and Advising Students
- Documentation of supervision activity includes names of those supervised and the nature and extent of the supervisory activity. It is also useful to indicate the outcome of the supervision (e.g. the thesis title and acceptance date, the citation information of a student publication, or the date and venue of a public performance).
- Publications and professional contributions (that contribute to teaching and learning)
- Workshops and seminars about teaching that you designed and instructed
- Research and professional contributions related to teaching – books, papers, articles, papers in conference proceedings, bibliographies, newsletters, unpublished conference papers
- Sample: Mable Kinzie
- Activities engaged upon to improve teaching and learning
- Summarize your attendance in any teaching-related seminars, workshops or conferences, and explain how you used new information in the classroom.
- Committee ServiceMany activities do not take place in classrooms but provide important support for teaching. Here is the place to list your involvement in the departmental, faculty and University-wide activities which contribute to strengthening teaching.
- Samples:
Evidence of Teaching Effectiveness
- Objective indicators of student progress, where available (proficiency tests, students’ standings on nation-wide tests, etc.)
- Feedback from supervisors or employers of graduates
Ways to Assess and Reflect Upon Teaching
- Departmental teaching evaluations (initiated by the unit)
- Peer evaluations or reviews based on visits to your classroom and/or scrutiny of your course materials
- Teaching awards
- Samples
- Mike Barnett
- Paul L. Schumann (see Evaluating Teaching Effectiveness)
Developing an ePortfolio
What are the advantages/disadvantages of an e-Portfolio compared to a paper-based portfolio?
The advantages of an e-Portfolio are generally considered to be:
- portability – you can access it from anywhere, unlike an often-sizeable paper copy
- media-richness – the ability to easily include graphics, audio, video and so on
- ease of repurposing – you can easily create several versions of your e-Portfolio for several different audiences
- control of access – you control who sees it, and for how long
- organizational ability – e-Portfolios are great for organizing a large amount of information, and keeping it all in one place
The disadvantage of a some ‘template-based’ systems (such as iWebFolio 2.0) is:
- lack of customizability – the style can be rigid and difficult to customize
The disadvantages of a teaching e-Portfolios in general are:
- possible lack of acceptance as promotional tool – your department may not know much about or accept a teaching e-Portfolio as part of a tenure/promotion process, although this is changing as more people learn about e-portfolios
- lack of printability – yes, you can print from most applications , and it looks acceptable, but it isn’t as easy as it should be, and MS Word still does it better
We’re not suggesting that you should or should not create a teaching e-portfolio. That’s up to you. Yes, it’s a commitment, but the reward is, we believe, a tool for improving your teaching. If you’re curious, send a message to [1].
Exploring ePortfolio Examples
Work in pairs and look at the three example of teaching portfolios and consider the following questions:
- What is the goal of the ePortfolio?
- Who is the intended audience
- What evidence of their teaching did the author provide?
- Overall impression
- Joanne Fox
- Shona Elis
- Rebecca Taylor
Resources
Teaching Portfolios
Seldin, Peter (1991) The Teaching Portfolio : A Practical Guide to Improved Performance and Promotion/Tenure Decisions. Bolton, MA: Anker Pub.
Seldin P. (2009) The Academic Portfolio: A Practical Guide to Documenting, Teaching, Research and Service. Sanfrancisco: Jossey Bass
ePortfolios
Barrett H, (2000). Electronic Teaching Portfolios: Mutimedia skills+portfolio development=powerful professional development. In B. Cambridge (Ed) Electronic Portfolios (pp 110-116) Washington, DC: American Association for Higher Education
Lorenzo G. & Ittelson, J. (2005) An Overview of e-Portfolios. Educause Learning Initiative,. Retrieved October 3, 2007 from http//:www.educase.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI13001.pdf
CTLT Teaching Portfolio Resource
Portfolio CoP Blog
WordPress Documentation
General Perspectives on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
Ambrose, Susan et all (2010) How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. Sanfrancisco: Jossey Bass
John Bransford (2000) How People Learn: Brain, Mind and Experience Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press