Making Teaching and Learning Visible: Course Portfolios and the Peer Review of Teaching

With higher education’s refocus over the last three decades on bringing greater recognition and reward to good teaching, the idea of peer review has gained popularity. One tool for documenting and reflecting on the quality of teaching and student learning is a course portfolio. A course portfolio captures and makes visible the careful, difficult, and intentional scholarly work of planning and teaching a course.

Illustrated through examples of course portfolios created during a four-year project on peer review of teaching, this book demonstrates how faculty can integrate well-designed peer review into their daily professional lives, thus improving their teaching by incorporating a means for assessment and collaboration and revealing the student learning that happens with effective teaching within an institutional reward systems.

This book offers a model of peer review intended to help faculty document, assess, reflect on, and improve teaching and student learning through the use of a course portfolio. It features a rich collection of materials—including four dozen exhibits to help assemble a portfolio, reviewers’ comments, and reflections drawn from more than 200 professors and portfolio authors in various disciplines and institutions—that faculty can use to develop their course portfolios to be used in their peer review of teaching.