It doesn’t cease to amaze me how different teaching requirements can be at various universities across countries, but also within the same country. Faculty appointments, and evaluations of faculty members for the next career step usually includes some sort of evaluation of their teaching. Often, this is on the basis of written documents, or a teaching portfolio.
Few places explain what a teaching portfolio should include, however, and even less inform the evaluator what exactly they should be looking at. Having been an evaluator of some, and also currently looking at a few, it’s an onerous task if you don’t know what counts, and how we measure “success” in education. Course evaluations aside (don’t get me started on those!), shouldn’t success include some longer-term measures as well on how former students do some years down the road, and how their learning has been implemented? For sure, that’s what we teach and preach when talking about outputs, outcome and impact – but as in all other programmes and projects that are evaluated on that basis, it is incredibly difficult to attribute any other than the shortest term measures to being the result of any one teaching instance, course, or faculty member.
Thus back to teaching portfolios. They are an art for sure. We have no good instructions for them, but various universities in Sweden do (see here, or here, or here). Swedish universities are also amongst the few that give some hints to evaluators how a teaching portfolio should look like, and thereby, what they should look at. See also Pelger and Larsson (2018) for their article on the matter. Interestingly, they do not e.g. include course evaluations in a teaching portfolio – yet again, that’s one of the very few things that are indeed attributable to a course.
Most universities also have some sort of teaching demonstration as part of their hiring process. Some prefer having it in front of a specialised unit, others in front of the hiring department. Surprisingly many people looking for an academic job don’t quite get the memo that while publications are your entry to getting an interview, without a good teaching demonstration, you can’t actually get hired. So for those of you having to prepare one, here are some useful hints from the US, some evaluation criteria from Finland, and even some tips for evaluators from the UK. At the end of the day, there are surprisingly many similarities across disciplines and even geographies in this regard.
References
Pelger S & Larsson M (2018) Advancement towards the scholarship of teaching and learning through the writing of teaching portfolios, International Journal for Academic Development, 23:3, 179-191, DOI: 10.1080/1360144X.2018.1435417
