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What’s so important about peer review of teaching portfolio components? An exploratory analysis of peer review episodes Abstract: Understanding and promoting effective teaching are central concerns of the engineering education community. In this paper, we report on research to investigate the processes by which construction of teaching portfolios in a socially supportive context can promote the advancement of teaching knowledge and ability. We believe that by characterizing how one specific intervention can advance teaching knowledge and effectiveness, we can generate findings and ideas that can help others engaged in the same goal.

Introduction

Understanding and promoting effective teaching are central concerns of the engineering education community since effective teaching can not only improve student learning, but also increase student motivation, persistence, and retention. Because teaching is complex, the approaches for improving teaching are necessarily diverse. Approaches include workshops on specific teaching techniques, individual consultations where educators get advice on individual challenges, creation of websites and books with teaching information, and development of communities of practice around teaching. But what do we know about practices such as these? Answers to this question, and strategies for answering this question, can be of interest to those faculty developers, instructional consultants, and others who are interested in helping educators advance their teaching.

Any approach to advance teaching will likely need to address two issues. First, the approach will need to be a learning event in that teachers are succeeding in learning something (e.g., new teaching techniques, new ways to think about students) that will help them improve their teaching. This might be considered effectiveness by traditional definitions. Second, the approach will need to fit into the complex schedules and contexts of educators since simply spending time learning about teaching may not be possible. For example, given that engineering educators (and future educators in the form of graduate students) are busy, approaches may need to help them solve actual problems they are encountering or be aligned with other requirements that the educators must meet (e.g., preparing materials for annual merit review or tenure review, getting a job). Such a framing suggests two questions that can be asked for any approach to help educators become better educators: a) to what extent does the approach lead to learning of knowledge and skills related to teaching and b) what outcomes other than learning about teaching do participants derive from the approach.

In our work, we have been focusing on one particular strategy – having individuals (primarily future engineering educators in the form of graduate students) create teaching portfolios through a scaffolded process and in a group oriented environment. Participants in our Engineering Teaching Portfolio Program (ETPP) prepare a teaching portfolio consisting of a teaching philosophy, two to five annotated artifacts, and a diversity statement1. Peer review defined as reciprocal evaluation of written products was originally conceived as a core element of the program. Participants typically use at least half of each session to review the portfolio elements of their peers. To date, our research on this educational innovation has focused on the

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Turns, J., & Yellin, J., & Huang, Y., & Gygi, K. (2006, June), What’s So Important About Peer Review Of Teaching Portfolio Components? An Exploratory Analysis Of Peer Review Episodes Within Etpp Paper presented at 2006 Annual Conference & Exposition, Chicago, Illinois. 10.18260/1-2--1259