Teaching Portfolio

While students' feedback towards a course is important in teaching evaluating, it is only one of the many possible sources of evidence. What teaching involves goes far beyond what happens in the classroom. Curriculum planning, developing new teaching materials, supervising students in their projects and laboratory works, working with TAs, etc. are just some of the obvious ones out of the long list of "teaching duties". A Teaching Portfolio is one of the methods which instructors can use to document and reflect upon the effort they have made in these diverse areas.

For resources about teaching portfolio, please refer to the list below.

Online Resources

• Use of Teaching Portfolio to Capture Your Scholarship in Teaching - This article about teaching portfolio published by CELT's predecessor at HKUST contains practical advice on how to construct a teaching portfolio.
• TEHE link about how to document teaching - TEHE stands for "Teaching Effectively in Higher Education in Hong Kong" which is a website maintained by Hong Kong Polytechnic University containing a lot of useful resources to support local instructors' teaching development effort. Inside one of the themes is "documenting teaching". The web site is a Hong Kong Polytechnic University/City University of Hong Kong initiative funded by the University Grants Committee (UGC). In this link, there are 13 papers on teaching portfolios and some video guides as well.
• Preparing a teaching portfolio - a guidebook - This is prepared by the well-known author on evaluation of teaching, Karron Lewis, for the Division of Instructional Innovation and Assessment of the university of Texas at Austin. A useful quick reference.

Resources on Teaching Portfolio in HKUST Library

Knapper, C. and Wright, Alan W. (2001) Using Portfolios to Document Good Teaching: Premises, Purposes, Practices. In C. Knapper and P. Cranton (Eds.) Fresh approaches to the evaluation of teaching: Vol 88 New directions for teaching and learning. Chris Knapper who helped to spread the use of teaching portfolios in higher education institutions around the world has made a number of visits to HKUST and conducted workshops on teaching portfolio here.

Edgerton, R., Hutchings, P. and Quinlan, K. (1991). The teaching portfolio: capturing the scholarship in teaching Washington D.C. : American Association of Higher Education. The book suggests one model in which faculty assemble a collection of carefully selected "work samples" accompanied by reflective commentary about them. It covers the "what", "why", and "how" of teaching portfolios, with pointers for getting started and a sampling of current campus practices. In it areeproductions of eight actual portfolio entries.

Seldin, p. (1997). The teaching portfolio : a practical guide to improved performance and promotion/tenure decisions Bolton, MA: Anker Pub. Co. Peter Seldin, a well-known author and researcher in faculty development who wrote and spoke extensively in teaching portfolio. This book on teaching portfolio is a classic and his views about teaching portfolio are often quoted in writings on teaching portfolios. The book also contains 25 samples teaching portfolio from across the various disciplines.

Centra, John A. (2000) Evaluating the Teaching Portfolio: A Role for Colleagues. In K. E. Ryan (Ed.) Evaluating teaching in higher education: a vision for the future: Vol 83 New directions for teaching and learning. This paper mainly is about how to evaluate teaching portfolios, a topic not often discussed in teaching portfolio literature. Centra gave a few examples to illustrate how evaluation was carried out in some institutions, and a proposal of how it should be done. He also addressed issue of reliability of using Teaching Portfolio to evaluate teaching.