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.

DANIEL BERNSTEIN is professor of psychology and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Kansas. His effort in establishing and formalizing faculty peer review began in 1994 with his attendance at a conference sponsored by the American Association for Higher Education. He teaches courses in the history of psychology, learning and motivation, and social psychology. His research work focuses on adult motivation and learning in children. In 1998, Dr. Bernstein was a fellow in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of teaching and learning; he was a charter member of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) Academy of Distinguished teachers; and in 2002 he received the Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Creative Award from UNL. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California-San Diego in 1973, and he taught psychology at UNL before joining the faculty at Kansas in the summer of 2002.

AMY NELSON BURNETT is professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), She received her Ph.D. in early modern history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1989. Since 2002, she has co-coordinated UNL’s Peer review of Teaching Project. She is the author of Teaching the Reformation: Ministers and their Message in Basel, 1529-1629 (Oxford University Press, 2006) and The Yoke of Christ: Martin Bucer and Christian Discipline (Truman State University Press, 1994), as well as numerous articles and essays on the Protestant Reformation in South Germany and Switzerland. She is the recipient of a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and has taught at the University of Hannover in Germany. In 1999, she received a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award.

AMY GOODBURN is associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and associate professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), where she teaches courses in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies. Since 2001, she has co-coordinated UNL’s Peer Review of Teaching Project. Her research focuses on ethnographic and teacher research, multicultural pedagogies, and curriculum development. Her recent edited, multicultural pedagogies, and curriculum development. Her recent edited collection is Composition, Pedagogy, and the Scholarship of Teaching (Boynton/Cook, 2002). Her contributions to teaching have been recognized by a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award, UNL’s Scholarly Teaching Award, and induction into UNL’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers.

PAUL SAVORY is professor in the Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). He earned his Ph.D. from Arizona State University in 1993. His teaching and research interests include engineering education, discrete-event computer simulation, engineering management, statistics, and operations research. Since 2000, he has co-coordinated UNL’s Peer review of Teaching Project. He has received numerous department, college, and university awards for his teaching effectiveness with the most recent being the 2004 Hollings Family master Teacher Award for the College of Engineering. In 2003, he was inducted into the UNL Academy of Distinguished teachers.