Teaching Portfolios In Academia – How Are They Used?
- Conference
- Location
-
Chicago, Illinois
- Publication Date
-
June 18, 2006
- Start Date
-
June 18, 2006
- End Date
-
June 21, 2006
- ISSN
-
2153-5965
- Conference Session
- Tagged Division
-
New Engineering Educators
- Page Count
-
16
- Page Numbers
-
11.1219.1 - 11.1219.16
- DOI
-
10.18260/1-2--1156
- Permanent URL
-
https://peer.asee.org/1156
- Download Count
-
451
Paper Authors
Jessica Yellin University of Washington
JESSICA M. H. YELLIN is a Research Scientist for the Scholarship on Teaching element of the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE). She holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Washington with dissertation research on structural vibration and damping of acoustic noise in thin-walled structures.
Yi-Min Huang University of Washington
YI-MIN HUANG is a Research Scientist for the Scholarship on Teaching element of the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE). She holds a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from Washington State University. Her research interests include assessment and evaluation.
Jennifer Turns University of Washington
JENNIFER TURNS is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Technical Communication, College of Engineering, University of Washington. She leads the Scholarship on Teaching element of the CAEE. She is also a Faculty Affiliate with the Center for Engineering Learning and Teaching and the Program for Educational Transformation through Technology.
Charity Tsuruda University of Washington
CHARITY TSURUDA is an undergraduate research assistant for the Scholarship on Teaching element of the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE). She is a junior in Industrial Engineering at the University of Washington.
Abstract
NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract
Teaching Portfolios in Academia – How Are They Used? Abstract
This paper presents a study that focuses on how 16 colleges and universities across the United States have incorporated teaching portfolios into their institutions. The two most common types of teaching portfolios are described in terms of their purpose, audience, and what elements they might contain. Reasons for creating and maintaining teaching portfolios include documenting teaching for merit reviews, promotion and tenure cases, faculty job searches, sharing course designs, and promoting reflective practice. Because the process of creating a personal teaching portfolio can be challenging, many institutions provide guidance to graduate students and faculty who are developing teaching portfolios.
Introduction
The use of teaching portfolios in academia has increased in popularity in recent years. As colleges and universities continue to improve their commitment to teaching, the need for strategies to document teaching as a scholarly activity parallel to other scholarly activities such as research and service have in turn become increasingly important. Highly influential authors such as Selden1 have proposed that faculty develop teaching portfolios as one way to achieve the goal of documenting teaching as a scholarly activity. Selden defines a faculty teaching portfolio as “a factual description of a professor’s teaching strengths and accomplishments. It includes documents and materials which collectively suggest the scope and quality of a professor’s teaching performance. It is to teaching what lists of publications, grants, and honors are to research and scholarship1.”
The purpose of this paper is to present a study that focuses on how 16 colleges and universities across the United States have incorporated teaching portfolios into their institutions. Because the process of creating a personal teaching portfolio can be challenging, many institutions provide guidance to graduate students and faculty who are developing teaching portfolios. In order to provide the best resources for new engineering educators interested in creating teaching portfolios, we explored what help and support these various teaching portfolio initiatives provided for their clients. This paper will first describe the two most common types of teaching portfolios in terms of their purpose, audience, and what elements they might contain. Next, we will present four reasons why engineering faculty, post-docs, and graduate students might want to build teaching portfolios. We will then describe the methods we used to select the institutions in our study sample and obtain information about their teaching portfolio initiatives. Finally, we will present our findings and summarize them in Table 1, which may be found in the Appendix.
Background
While it is difficult to differentiate the type of teaching portfolio (e.g. persuasive vs. formative) from its purpose, the following two sections will attempt to do just that. The first section will define different types of teaching portfolios, discuss their potential audiences and describe how they might be useful to engineering educators. The second section will explore specific reasons
Yellin, J., & Huang, Y., & Turns, J., & Tsuruda, C. (2006, June), Teaching Portfolios In Academia – How Are They Used? Paper presented at 2006 Annual Conference & Exposition, Chicago, Illinois. 10.18260/1-2--1156
ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2006 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015