Action statements as workshop outcomes

Marva A. Barnett
Director, Teaching Resource Center, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, U.S.A. E-mail: marva@virginia.edu

As a result of the workshop "Using Portfolios in Educational Development" at Wroxton Abbey, I collated and adapted a number of the recommendations proposed by workshop participants, giving credit, of course, and will distribute them to our portfolio writers during the May 1998 workshop and in the future. Handouts include these, for example: "Principles and Suggestions for Effective Consulting with Portfolio Writers" and "Helping a Colleague Doing a Portfolio Get `Unstuck'." Inspired perhaps by the workshop, I have also collected and edited suggestions offered by U.Va. portfolio writers over the past three years.

In addition, my colleague Judith Reagan (TRC Associate Director) and I will present at the October POD (Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education) a workshop entitled "Building Belief in Teaching Portfolios at a Research Institution." I hope to replicate there, in some sense, the useful working group I participated in at Wroxton. Working with colleagues at similar types of universities, we will compare the challenges of promoting teaching portfolios and the solutions we have tried. I also plan to summarize for US colleagues information received at the Wroxton conference.

David Baume

I shall explore much further the idea that a Portfolio is (or should be or could usefully be seen or used as) a piece of self assessment. Such a self-assessment Portfolio contains two elements:
The argument that the candidate has attained the learning outcomes, or met the standards, towards which the claim is being made; and the evidence to back this claim.

Carole Baume
HEFCE FDTL Co-ordinator, based at the Open University, UK
Email: c.baume@open.ac.uk

I will draft the contents list for the portfolios we would use for the first two courses in our new Centre for Higher Education Practice at The Open University - the programme which will lead to SEDA Associate Teacher Accreditation and the programme which will lead to full SEDA Teacher Accreditation.

What would be different because of the workshop was that I would now aim for a portfolio of the size of Jan van Tartwijk's - not of the size of the SEDA Fellowship Portfolio box!

Bland Tomkinson
UMIST, UK
Email: Bland.Tomkinson@umist.ac.uk

Occasional Paper 2/97: Towards a Taxonomy of Teaching Portfolios This paper was inspired by the 1997 ICED International Workshop on Teaching Portfolios held at Wroxton College, UK, in April 1997.

This document contains a brief questionnaire about teaching portfolios and I would be grateful if you would respond to it if your institution uses teaching portfolios.

As a result of the Workshop, I intend to hold a lunchtime briefing for Heads of Department to talk about the general ideas behind portfolios as well as to introduce the porfolio scheme being developed by the Committee that reviews probation. I also intend to do some follow-up work on the concept of a Taxonomy of Teaching Portfolios, including the concept of a "meta-portfolio" and a "proto-portfolio".

Jan van Tartwijk
IVLOS Institute of Education, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Email: j.vantartwijk@ivlos.ruu.nl

I am further exploring the possibilities for the use of portfolio's for both summative and formative evaluation in a (large scale) faculty development program such as the one at Utrecht University. The question I hope to answer is how to design portfolio's which are manageble in size, provide material for a reliable and valid assessment of teaching quality and are at same time a useful tool for stimulating teachers' professional growth. I hope to learn from the experiences of other participants such as Carole Baume, who is working with large numbers of portfolio's at the Open University as well.

Marjorie Terdal
Portland State University, USA Email: marjorie@nh1.nh.pdx.edu

1. Follow-up with faculty/staff at Portland State University who came to a portfolio workshop or a mentoring session to determine whether they have begun/completed a portfolio.
2. Research project--examine revised promotion and tenure guidelines for all departments at Portland State (about 50) to look for explicit or implicit references to use of portfolios to document requests for promotion or tenure; also look for definitions of scholarship of teaching.
3. Assemble guidelines for preparing a portfolio for promotion and tenure decisions and a collection of sample portfolios from faculty, administrators, academic professionals that were successful in meeting their goals.
4. Develop a mentoring group to carry on my work as a faculty in residence for portfolio development, a position which ends Summer 1997.