First it was teaching portfolios, modeled on the way artists showcase a collection of work. The idea was to assemble a series of artifacts and reflections that captured the details and essence of one’s teaching. Teaching portfolios continue to be used as an alternative way of documenting and describing the often-private work that occurs in the classroom. They have been followed by something even more specific, the course portfolio, which allows faculty to delve deeply into the details of a single course. A new book, Making Teaching and Learning Visible, takes course portfolios to a new level.

The authors propose two kinds of course portfolios: the benchmark course portfolio and the inquiry course portfolio. “A benchmark portfolio presents a snapshot of your students’ learning that occurs in one of your courses” (p. 12). On the other hand, an inquiry course portfolio “is useful for documenting improvement in teaching your course over time and for assessing the long-term impact of teaching changes, the success of teaching approaches, and the improvement in student learning.” (p. 12)

What’s included in each of these portfolios? The benchmark portfolio, as these authors propose it, includes a description of the course and its goals, a description of course activities, and something that documents and analyzes student learning. In each case, the authors recommend that the material be assembled and presented in memo format. The process of writing focuses attention on instructional details often not considered closely.

The level of detail proposed for each of these areas of analysis illustrates why the process can be such an eye-opening experience for faculty. For example, to document and analyze student learning, the authors propose that faculty “identify samples of student work that clearly represent high pass, medium pass, and low pass for a classroom activity.” (p. 34) This can be done for a homework assignment, a quiz, a book review, a lab report, a case study, or an oral report. If quizzes are selected, the authors recommend assembling a representative example for each of the three pass categories. Then they propose looking at student performance across sets of quizzes and preparing a chart to show the statistics. After this, consideration should be given to one set of quizzes in which students did well and to another in which they did not do well. All this data taken together will give faculty a complete understanding of how quizzes do or do not promote student learning.

The inquiry portfolio gets at improvement issues by focusing on “a specific question or issue regarding teaching practices, course structures, or student learning over time.” (p. 88) The questions addressed in an inquiry portfolio often arise in the process of preparing the benchmark portfolio. The three major parts of the inquiry portfolio are a memo that states the issue or problem to investigate, a memo that generates a hypothesis and develops data-collection strategy, and a final memo that analyzes and assesses the findings.

An art instructor whose inquiry portfolio is highlighted in the book writes about how this approach worked for her. “Although the methods I used seemed at first too scientific for a subjective area like art, the ‘Hypothesis, Data, Conclusion’ structure allowed me to be more objective about my teaching. It is all too easy to get caught up in the personalities of students or blind arrogance about the quality of my work in the classroom. The more scientific structure allowed me to consider my preconceived notions about what I hoped would happen, look at student work as raw data, and analyze the situation to come to an informed conclusion.” (p. 120)

The book contains multiple examples of sections and complete portfolios for both the benchmark and inquiry portfolios. They show exactly how to do what’s being proposed, but more important they show the value of looking this closely at an individual course. Most faculty do not often track learning in a course. The process of doing so can affirm methods, or it can challenge faculty to consider alternatives.

What’s being proposed in the book is a labor-intensive, time-consuming process. With what most faculty already have to do, it’s easy to dismiss this careful analysis of how teaching promotes learning as just too much work (especially if there’s no institutional incentive). And yet, if we truly value teaching, if we want to make good on our claim to take our work in the classroom seriously, if we want in practice to apply the word scholarly to teaching, then this is the route we must take. You won’t spend much time in this book without seeing the tremendous value that accrues when a course is put under a microscope and closely examined.

Reference: Bernstein, D., Burnett, A. M., Goodburn, A., & Savory, P. (2006). Making Teaching and Learning Visible: Course Portfolios and the Peer Review of Teaching. Bolton, MA: Anker. It may be ordered online at www.ankerpub.com.

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