A scholarly teaching portfolio is a document that illustrates what you value in your teaching, how you approach teaching and your students' learning as an object of research and investigation. This document is supported by an archive of materials that demonstrate your scholarly practice. The portfolio shows what you have seen as issues and problems in your teaching. It demonstrates what you have done to attend to these and how your students learning has benefited as a result. It also indicates how and what you have learned.
This unit of work is not just a guide to the collation of a portfolio of teaching achievements. It is designed to engage you in thinking about what scholarly teaching is and therefore how it might be achieved in your own teaching and how you will communicate to demonstrate your scholarship to others.
The compilation of a scholarly teaching portfolio will open your teaching to public scrutiny, put it before colleagues and invite comment. Such a document has the capacity to provide you with an evidentiary basis to support applications for promotion, for alternative employment and for research and development grants. It has the potential to demonstrate your accountability to your students, your peers and your institution. The development of the portfolio will enable you to better recognize the effectiveness of your teaching processes which thus far you may have taken for granted and to see the quality of your work in new ways.
Developing a teaching portfolio in a scholarly way may well provide the Eureka effect of discovering what has been below the level of consciousness in your teaching, a discovery which may enable you to make your teaching more enjoyable and more effective.
Taking a scholarly approach means that you will refer to valid, current and comprehensive evidence about your approaches to teaching, such as
Whilst the completion of this document will be an important evaluative tool and significant in obtaining recognition for the quality of your teaching scholarship the process of engaging in critical reflection on your work involved in its development will be a powerful learning journey.
In the development of a Teaching Portfolio you will assemble an archive of materials that will demonstrate and support your case for recognition as a scholarly teacher. The archive houses the materials and reports that you have generated as part of your scholarly approach to teaching. See Module 1.
The investigation into your students' learning and the planned change to your teaching practice that you undertake as part of your work for Module 1(or any other program developing tertiary teaching and learning) represent the kind of evidence that you will use in the development of your portfolio. Examples of study into teaching and learning in higher education and examples of contributing to the discourse or knowledge of teaching and learning in higher education are also items or artifacts that can be included in the evidence section of your portfolio.
In addition to the activities listed above reference to many of the exercises in the Peer review section of the module can contribute to the development of your scholarship and its documentation. See:
You will develop attachments, samples and reports that illustrate the activities that you undertake as part of your every day practice in enabling your students to learn. Your scholarly teaching portfolio will incorporate your pedagogical philosophy, the approach you take to the complex task of enabling your students to make sense of a particular discipline based on your investigation of your students' learning. This portfolio will assist you demonstrate the merits of your case for promotion purposes or to obtain employment as a university teacher. The creation of such a portfolio in itself contributes to the scholarship of university teaching.
See AAHE Home Page and Check out Teaching Initiatives Project, Course and Teaching Portfolios references.