Summarized by James T. P. Yao, 29 January 2000

"Over the past decade, teaching portfolios have emerged as a popular tool for assessing the educational work of faculty members. How useful are they? Peter Seldin, a professor of management at Pace University, champions portfolios, while Candace Burns, a professor of educational foundations at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock, questions their effectiveness."

1. "A Positive Appraisal," by Peter Seldin, Academe, January-February 2000, pp. 37-44.

"A historic change is taking place in higher education: teaching is being taken more seriously. … As for faculty, they are being held accountable, as never before, to provide indisputable evidence of the quality of their classroom instruction. In the past, the routine approach to evaluating teaching has relied almost exclusively on student ratings, perhaps supplemented by a testimonial letter or two. … The best way I know to get at both the complexity and the individuality of teaching is the teaching portfolio. … It is a collection of materials that document teaching performance. It brings together in one place information about a professor's most significant teaching strengths and accomplishments. The portfolio is to teaching what lists of publications, grants, and honors are to research and scholarship. … Just as in a curriculum vitae, all claims made in the portfolio must be supported by empirical evidence."

"No single recipe exists for preparing a teaching portfolio. … But from personal review of more than five hundred portfolios prepared by professors in different academic disciplines and institutions, I can say that certain items turn up in portfolios with much more frequency than others. Good portfolios for tenure and promotion or for teaching improvement usually contain items from three broad areas: the products of teaching (student learning), materials from the portfolio creator, and information from others. …"

"… Because the content and organization of portfolios differ from one professor to another, portfolios used for decisions about tenure, promotion, or retention usually contain both mandated and elective items. … Mandated items might include a reflective statement by a professor on his or her teaching, representative course syllabi, summaries of student evaluations, and the chair's assessment of the professor's teaching contribution to the department. … A portfolio written to improve teaching may focus less on information from others and more on reflective analysis, plan for the future, and assessment through products of student learning. …"

"Common Questions

…

How long is the typical portfolio? The typical portfolio has a narrative of seven to ten pages, followed by a series of appendixes that document the claims made in the narrative. Often, a three-ring binder holds the portfolio, and tabs identify the different appendixes. …

How much time does it take to prepare a portfolio? Most faculty members construct their portfolios in twelve to fifteen hours over several days. Much of the time is spent in thinking, planning, and gathering the documentation for the appendixes.

Can a portfolio be put together by a professor working alone? It can be, but this isolated approach has limited potential to contribute to tenure and promotion decisions or to improve teaching performance. … In practice, the portfolio is best prepared in consultation with another person. …"

Can an impressive portfolio gloss over weak teaching? Absolutely not, because the weak teacher cannot document effective teaching performance. …

Why are portfolio models so important to professors preparing their own portfolios? The models enable them to see how others, in different disciplines as well as their own, have combined documents and materials into a coherent whole. …

Should administrators develop the portfolio program and then tell faculty to prepare portfolio? Imposing a portfolio program on faculty is almost certain to lead to strenuous faculty resistance. Faculty need to be involved in both developing and running the program. …

How does the portfolio differ from the usual end-of-the-year faculty report to administrators? It differs in several important ways: (a) the portfolio is not prepared by the faculty member in isolation, but is based on collaboration; (b) the purpose of the portfolio determines what is to be included and how it is arranged; (c) the portfolio empowers faculty to choose documents and materials that, in their judgment, best reflect their performance as teachers…; (d) the process of portfolio preparation often stimulates professors to reflect on why they do what they do as teachers. …"

"Some Recommendations

…

• Present the portfolio program in a candid, complete, and clear manner to every faculty member and administrator.
• Be certain that professors have a significant role in developing and running the portfolio program.
• Involve some of the institution's best teachers, because their participation attracts other faculty to the program. And involve some admired teachers who are also prominent researchers, because their participation will signal the value of portfolios.
• Rely on faculty volunteers. Don't force anyone to participate.
• Obtain top-level administrative support for the portfolio program and an institutional commitment to provide the necessary resources to launch it successfully.
• Keep all faculty and relevant administrators informed about what is going on every step of the way.
• Allow sufficient time - a year or even two - for acceptance and implementation. …
• Allow room for individual differences in portfolios. …
• Be sure that all professors know the criteria and standards by which portfolios will be evaluated. …

… Many faculty members find that the process of developing a portfolio stimulates self-improvement. And, perhaps most important, many colleges and universities find that portfolios help to underscore teaching as an institutional priority."

1. "Another Perspective," by Candace W. Burns, Academe, January-February 2000, pp. 44-47.

"… Teaching portfolios are a collection of materials meant to document teaching performance. They typically include statements by professors about their teaching effectiveness, along with supporting information, such as sample syllabi, sample student work, student ratings, and comments from students and colleagues. Unfortunately, in their zeal to remedy what may or may not be a problem, proponents of portfolios ignore over twenty years of research into what makes teaching effective. …"

"Unanswered Questions

First, are the professors who receive 'portfolio training' … randomly selected … or volunteers? … Volunteers tend as a group to be more motivated toward a particular method than non-volunteers. …

Second, do institutions handpick some professors to participate in teaching reforms? If so, sampling bias may infect the discussion of reform. Seldin suggests that institutions involve their 'most respected professors from the start' to gain faculty members' acceptance for portfolios. More than likely, Seldin has chosen the portfolios of some these 'respected professors' for his books. Faculty members who have participated in two other heavily promoted reform projects, the AAHE's Teaching Initiative, which has encouraged and nurtured portfolio development, and the Carnegie Foundation's Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL), have all been pre-selected. For the AAHE's Teaching Initiative, provosts from twelve universities selected three departments, which then chose faculty volunteers. And the Carnegie Foundation's Web site actually uses the word 'tapped' when referring to the selection of CASTL's 'Carnegie Scholars,' whose mission is to 'advance the practice and profession of teaching.' According to the Web site, professors are selected based 'not only on individual qualifications but also on the need to assemble a group of scholars with … complementary strengths, interests, and experiences.' One example of a qualifying experience is prior use of teaching portfolios. The Pew Charitable Trusts fund the Carnegie Scholars; this same foundation also co-fund the AAHE's Teaching Initiative. There is a circularity to a reward structure administered by foundations that provide benefits to people who buy into certain methodologies, such as teaching portfolios, and who then cite these projects as examples of the effectiveness of the methodologies. …"

"Are teaching portfolios time-consuming to construct? … But even advocates of teaching portfolios admit that preparing them may require much work. The AAHE's experts explain that 'there's unlikely to be any simple formula for how much is enough, but further experimentation might get us closer to a sense of what is sufficient.' … Researchers who have studied the impact of mandatory portfolios on certain college campuses have expressed concern that constructing the portfolio itself, rather than improving one's teaching, too often becomes the focal point. … Obviously, time commitment to portfolio construction can vary widely, depending on the ground rules that different campuses use and on the stakes involved. Along with issues of time, there is the ultimate question whether faculty and administrators know how to use the data collected in these portfolios. …"

"Given questions such as these, together with the lack of controlled studies on the effectiveness of portfolios, it seems clear that faculty and administrators would be better off looking at existing research before jumping on the portfolio bandwagon. … For new faculty members, for example, teaching portfolios might be counterproductive. …"

"… Some high-profile education reformers who include teaching portfolios in the methodologies they advocate have revealed that they lack confidence in the validity of some of their recommendations. Lee Shulman and Pat Hutchings of the Carnegie Foundation, for example, admit that 'there is a large set of issues related to methods and rules of evidence, and therefore to issues of rigor and credibility.' … Shulman and Hutchings have even gone so far as to raise a fundamental question, which is, 'Put simply, will this work 'make it' as scholarship?' I fear, however, that this question is rhetorical. After all, if they continue to handpick and fund participants who advance certain methodologies, they themselves are not taking the rules of scholarship seriously. Meanwhile, faculty members may find that recommendations from proponents of teaching reform, whom Hutchings once referred to as 'powerful players,' increasingly find their way into policies and procedures on campuses. The spread of teaching portfolios is a compelling case in point."

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