PREPARING A TEACHING DOSSIER

by James McNinch, Assistant Director, Teaching Development Centre

What is it?

The Canadian Association of University Teachers, pioneers in this field, suggests that a teaching dossier be a five to eight page document with appropriate appendices. (Because of the influence of official bilingualism here in Canada, dossier is the preferred term; in Britain the word used is portfolio; in the States both terms are used).

The teaching dossier is an opportunity to document and present teaching achievements both for self-assessment and for review and interpretation by others who make personnel decisions.

Much more than our Annual Information Form, a dossier becomes a yearly and a cumulative record of teaching activities and results.  It is future-oriented (i.e. developmental) as much as it is past-oriented (i.e. evaluative).  Its use, therefore, is as much for individual teaching development as it is for personnel decisions, but it can be very useful in applications for teaching awards, applications for sabbatical leaves, and teaching development grants, as well as for merit, tenure, and promotion decisions.

Why use one?

Certainly the old saw that teaching -- unlike, supposedly, research and publication -- is impossible to assess objectively is often an excuse for failing to gather substantive data about teaching. 

According to the Collective Agreement between Faculty and the University of Regina, faculty members  “shall maintain scholarly\professional competence and pedagogic competence” (my italics).  In the proposed changes to the collective agreement, Article 17 states “The Dean will provide probationary members annually, an assessment of their performance and areas that need improving” (my italics). 

In the past, determining who successfully met the criteria for decisions around promotion, merit and tenure was the responsibility of department heads, deans and faculty committees.  Today, the onus increasingly is on individual faculty members not to rely on the perceptions of others, but to document how they have met the established criteria.  The result is that both the individual and the institution are more accountable to the other.  The teaching dossier is a useful tool in this regard.

Jarvis (1991) suggests that junior faculty, especially, apprise themselves of criteria by which they will be judged and begin collecting and documenting material as quickly as possible in their career.  “Promotion and tenure decisions usually favour those whose dossiers are collected and organized with careful attention to the local criteria, both written and unwritten”(p.34). 

This can be a tall order for the novice instructor coming to terms with the culture and politics of academia and learning to speak the “academic dialect”(Sawyer, p.239).

How do I Organize it?

The following categories may help to make a case for an instructor’s effectiveness:

** a statement regarding your teaching philosophy, goals, and strategies;

** a description of your teaching, including planning, preparing and teaching courses, assessing student learning, and giving feedback;

** an evaluation of teaching accomplishments; and

** suggestions regarding possible changes for future teaching. 

The Dossier could consist of four sections:

~  Approach to Teaching

~  Teaching Contributions

~  Reflections on and Assessment of Teaching

~  Supporting Documentation

What Should I include?

There is a wide range of options as to what to include in a dossier, but one rule of thumb is -- ‘the greater the diversity of sources the more balanced the perspective’.  Often administrators rely too heavily on student evaluations of teaching, “together with chance gossip” adds Jarvis (p. 27), to the exclusion of other information.

Another good idea is not to overwhelm the reader with detailed documentation.  Keep the student evaluations of a particular class, for example, in an appendix, but summarize the results into a salient paragraph or two in the body of the dossier under assessment of teaching.  . 

Student Evaluations:

Systematic ratings by students are widely used in most universities today.  Students are in a good position to judge the following:  student-instructor rapport, course workload, the instructor’s ability to communicate, coherence of course organization, and fairness and explicitness in grading.  Because of their inexperience, they are less able to judge the instructor’s knowledge of the discipline or scholarship or the appropriateness of course content or choice of texts.  Evaluations from students are useful primarily for discovering consistent trends over time and over a number of different courses. 

The written comments of students are most useful for amplifying student ratings and for encouraging instructor reflection.   Analysing comments as to their kind and distribution among student types, however, is a difficult process.

Alumni Evaluations

These provide a longer-term context for the worth of an instructor’s endeavours in light of the experience and perspective of time.  Discovering what was memorable about a particular class or prof after three or four years can be quite revealing, although collecting anonymous data can be difficult.  .  A distinction between solicited and unsolicited and known or anonymous commentators must be made.

Student Achievement

Because of the difficulty in determining the validity and reliability of tests and the methods of determining grades, this can be a problematic area even in classes which rely on the most standardised and objective of pre- and post tests like English as a Second Language or Mathematics.  In other subjects it may be important to show how the objectives of the syllabi were tested on exams and then how well students met those objectives.  Similarly, a “first rate” student essay cannot be included as an example of teaching outcomes, without also explaining what the topic, the criteria, and the expectations for the essay assignment were in the first place.  Including the detailed marking and comments on an essay you regard as poor or unacceptable will also give a more complete picture of student achievement in your classes. 

Peer Evaluations

Based on visits to your classroom and critical assessment of your course materials, peer evaluations are more popular with faculty who are comfortable using a team or collaborative approach to their work.   It should be noted, however, that “ratings by colleagues are generally unreliable, are not well related to student achievement, and are usually more generous than are student evaluations” (Braskamp et al, p. 66).  Like all other measures, peer-evaluations should only be used with caution and in conjunction with other methods of evaluation. 

The observations and feedback provided by a member of the Teaching Development Centre can be useful in improving teaching, but such services are confidential and not meant to be used in personnel decisions. 

Self-evaluation

This section can include your philosophy of teaching and its relationship to scholarship, and assessments of your teaching  effectiveness, particularly if you have done research into your own teaching.  Descriptions of innovations and strategies that worked well and why, as well as those that were less successful, provide a portrait of the teacher as a reflective practitioner. 

Other documentation:

Circumstantial evidence of participation in conferences and seminars devoted to issues in teaching is only somewhat useful; much better is evidence of such things as:

v service on committees devoted to improving teaching,

v involvement in mentoring and peer consultation programs,

v being the recipient of a teaching award,

v being part of curriculum, program, accreditation or strategic planning committees,

v co-ordination of a multi-section class and leadership for teaching assistants,

v teaching and presentations about teaching outside your department and at

v conferences.

v research into and professional contributions related to teaching,

v any fellowships and research grants related to teaching development. 

An appendix might also include curriculum materials, exams, class notes, and other classroom materials, like lab manuals, which you have developed. 

Information about the design and implementation of a new course should emphasise the relationship between content and methodology. 

Conclusion

The Teaching Development Centre can assist individual faculty members with the process of developing and maintaining an active teaching dossier.  Many academics are surprised to learn that there is a much more extensive and sophisticated literature on the evaluation of university teaching than there is on the evaluation of scholarly publication.  While a dossier provides the faculty member with but one form of professional accountability to the university community, it also clearly serves the interests of the faculty member in both a formative and summative way. 

References: 

Braskamp, Larry A.  and others.  Evaluating Teaching Effectiveness: A Practical Guide.  Beverly

     Hills:  Sage, 1984.

Day, Rene and others.  Teaching Dossier: A Guide.  Edmonton: UofA Teaching Services, 1996.

Jarvis, Donald K.  Junior Faculty Development: A Handbook. New York: MLAA, 1991.

O’Neil Carol and Alan Wright.  Recording Teaching Accomplishments: A Dalhousie  Guide  to

     the Teaching Dossier.  Halifax:  Dalhousie Instructional Development Office, 1992.

Sawyer, R. McLaran and others.  The Art and Politics of College Teaching:  A Practical Guide for the

     Beginning Professor.  New York: Peter Lang, 1992.

Shore, Bruce M. and others.  The Teaching Dossier:  A Guide to its Preparation and 

     Use. (Rev.ed.) Montreal: CAUT, 1986, reprinted 1991.