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

A course portfolio captures and makes visible the careful, difficult, and intentional scholarly work of planning and teaching a course and is an invaluable tool for documenting and reflecting on the quantity and quality of student learning. Illustrated through examples of course portfolios created through a four-year project on peer review of teaching, this book demonstrates that well-designed peer review can be integrated into the daily professional lives of faculty, improve faculty teaching by providing a guiding context for formative assessment and collaboration, and make the learning that comes from effective teaching visible and accessible for review within institutional reward systems.

Explicitly intended to help faculty conceptualize how their teaching and the student learning that results can be made visible, this book offers a model of peer review to document, assess, reflect on, and improve teaching and student learning through the use of a course portfolio. It provides a rationale for treating teaching as intellectual work, accompanied by a rich collection of materials—course portfolios, reviewers' comments, and portfolio authors' reflections drawn from more than 200 professors in various disciplines and institutions—that faculty can use to develop their own models for peer review of teaching.