. Some PhD programs require an assessment portfolio as a program requirement. Their purpose is to help determine if a person has completed the requirements for earning a PhD. Contents vary among institutions; the University of Michigan does not have a portfolio requirement as of Dec. 2005.
New PhDs might create a career portfolio to present themselves professionally to potential employers. Career portfolios supplement your résumé and cover letter; they do not replace your standard materials. The advantage of a career portfolio is that it allows you to include more in-depth descriptions of your work, and to give samples of your teaching and research, and, with permission, of student work as well. It is especially powerful to be able to use actual samples to demonstrate student learning between the beginning and end of a course.
It is critical to keep your portfolio concise. Five to ten web pages, each 1-2 screens long, or 10 PDF pages should be plenty. No one will read more than that, so it is better that you select your best 10 pages of information instead of letting your readers self-select the 10 pages they first stumble across.
Just as students may create portfolios of their work as a course assessment activity, so might faculty members create portfolios of their teaching and research to demonstrate their achievements for tenure review.
Tenure portfolios usually contain a CV (often with links to detail pages), annotated samples of student work, links to online publications, links to the web sites of projects, etc. The following examples give an idea of what some nursing schools expect in a tenure review portfolio
Faculty can create portfolios with the intent of assessing and improving their own teaching. The Peer Review of Teaching Project, peer reviews faculty teaching portfolios in an attempt to recognize the scholarship of teaching. Several University of Michigan faculty have participated in this program, which designates two types of teaching portfolios: benchmark and inquiry portfolios.
Key to any portfolio program is keeping the portfolio focused and concise. This decreases faculty work load, improves the thinking going into the portfolio, and moderates the burden on reviewers.
Benchmark portfolios serve as a snapshot of a course and asks "How well are my students currently learning? How well am I teaching?" Based on the answer, faculty may decide to modify their courses to improve student learning, faculty efficiency, etc. See samples.
Inquiry portfolios track a specific change to a course. For example, if a professor moves from a lecture-based format to a web-enhanced format where students complete problem sets online, she might track the effects of that change in an inquiry portfolio. See samples.
Emily Springfield - Media Consultant
- University of Michigan School of Nursing -
.