Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning - Making the case for good teaching

It is relatively easy for lecturers to make a case for their effectiveness as researchers, but it has not been so easy to justify effective teaching. Now, with a solid base of research evidence available about what constitutes effective teaching and learning at university, it is possible in a teaching portfolio to demonstrate competence as a tertiary teacher.

A teaching portfolio is a concise, reflective document summarising your approach to teaching. It demonstrates alignment between your philosophy of teaching and learning and the decisions you make about teaching. It provides evidence of significant endeavours and achievements in teaching. It can contain information from a variety of sources and is usually accompanied by appendices that contain the evidence to support the claims you have made in the portfolio. It is a good idea throughout the year to collect useful material such as examples of curriculum development, SPOT data, short reflective summaries of teaching outcomes, and peer feedback in a personal 'teaching archive'. Appreciative emails and notes from students are also important! The lecturer can then selectively draw upon these materials as evidence when updating the portfolio, using both qualitative and quantitative data to explore effectiveness and improvement.

An up-to-date teaching portfolio can be used for a range of career-related purposes that require evidenced documentation of effective teaching. These include applications for teaching and learning grants, awards, tenure and promotion. Maintaining a teaching portfolio is a regular, iterative and reflective process of documenting scholarly teaching activity, significant initiatives and achievements over time.

Strong teaching portfolios track the development of the teacher, tracing the progressive improvements to both instructional expertise and curriculum design as a result of continuing engagement with students, colleagues and the literature on teaching. However, many teaching portfolios are really just mini CVs, acting as a record of accomplishment, not development. They fail to integrate the reflective focus which can lead to significant learning.

As our two nominees for the Australian University Teaching Awards Individual awards note, there is a large challenge in moving to this higher level of reflection on teaching. It requires both humility and openness to doing things better. It also forces the teacher to consider WHY one does certain things, and what impact it has on the learners.

There is a strong trend across the world to regard teaching portfolios as a crucial element in our teaching development. To be so, they need to be more than a list. It leads to an important question for teaching academics: are teaching portfolios simply a self-advertisement for promotion, which seeks to put the best picture forward about what has been accomplished, or do they act as reflective yardsticks for exploring what has been accomplished, and what is yet to be targeted? Mini CV or reflective tool? It's up to you.