Purpose

Through all of my teaching activities, the standards of scholarship of teaching serve as important guide in my thought process as I design, develop, and teach courses. When I began teaching as a full-time faculty member in 2007, I became very intrigued with the idea of developing a course portfolio as a way to document and evaluate my own teaching activities. I felt that developing a course portfolio would facilitate the incorporation of the standards of scholarship of teaching in my development as an educator.

Course portfolios have been defined by Bernstein, , Burnett, Goodburn & Savory (2006) as something that:

       "captures and makes visible the scholarly work of teaching by combining inquiry into the

        intellectual work of a course with the investigation of the quality of student understanding

        and performance. A course portfolio enables the teacher to document the careful, difficult,

        and intentional scholarly work of planning and teaching a course." (p. 8)

Specifically, I think a course portfolio facilitates the scholarship of teaching in the following ways:

       1. The development of the course portfolio encourages reflection of all aspects of course development and teaching.

       2. It provides a vehicle to document teaching activities.

       3. A course portfolio allows the rationale used to organize the course or learning activities to be 

           articulated.

       4. It provides a mechanism to demonstrate student feedback and reflection.

       5. The reflection required by the faculty member throughout the process inherently guides

           course revision activities.

       6. A course portfolio presents course content and teaching activities in a way that enables

           review by students, peers, and colleagues.

Whereas a paper-based teaching portfolios could achieve the goals I had in mind for a course portfolio, I was interested in using a electronic format. An electronic format offers several advantages including flexibility of organization; usability; the ability to include digital media; and a means by which to readily share the portfolio with peers, achieving one of the key goals of scholarship of teaching.

So as I continued to explore both of these endeavors - scholarship of teaching and course portfolios - I am confident that they are interdependent in guiding thinking about teaching practices. The activity of planning for and developing this portfolios necessitated constant reflection on my decision-making and rationale surrounding the development of my course. It does require time, effort, and patience; but these activities have certainly supported my growth as a faculty member and undoubtedly strengthened my teaching practices.

 

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