Teaching Portfolio Guidelines

Guidelines for Preparing and Submitting A Teaching Portfolio For Promotions Review

1. General guidelines

a. The Teaching Portfolio as part of your packet

The Teaching Portfolio in one form or another is in broad use at Universities and Schools of Medicine. Individual faculty are encouraged to document their teaching roles and to maintaina portfolio of evidence of their teaching effectiveness, which may be measured in learner evaluation data, learner performance data, peer assessment, or even patient outcomes data as examples. Annual portfolio review with a mentor or chair can guide a faculty member to seek faculty development to improve teaching skills, or to seek new and more challenging teaching assignments in order to develop as a teacher.

The University of Maryland requires documentation of “excellence in teaching” for promotion. The Teaching Portfolio that a candidate submits for promotions review should be a record of the activity and the impact or evaluation data for that activity for approximately 5 years prior to the review.

There are many teachers in many subjects at the UMSOM. The School’s Committee on Appointments, Promotion and Tenure is open to learning about the role and impact of the teaching that any candidate for promotion or tenure has performed. There will be information about your teaching roles in your Curriculum Vitae (C.V.) and you will likely choose to describe teaching roles in your Personal Statement. Your chair and one or more of your internal or external references may speak to your teaching excellence in their letters. The Teaching Portfolio and supporting documents you submit should be crafted with this in mind, recognizing that the Committee will review all material carefully.

b. Documentation of your teaching roles, activity, and impact or outcome

We suggest that you begin by listing your major teaching responsibilities in the past 5 years. These may include clinical teaching (in inpatient or outpatient settings, one-one remediation, medical student/resident/CME teaching), classroom teaching (lecturing , small-group teaching, teaching with technology such as podcasting or web-based teaching), advising and mentoring (including serving as a thesis adviser or as a lab mentor). List as many roles as you can think of and be sure that these are all listed in your CV. Focus next on the evaluation or impact data that is available for each of these roles. Is there learner evaluation data? Is there learner outcome data? Collect all the information that is available to you and identify where you need data to support evidence of teaching excellence.

2. Format

There are a number of effective formats for presenting your teaching roles and impact data so that the Committee can evaluate your teaching. We suggest the following categories:

1. Direct Teaching
2. Advising and Mentoring
3. Educational Leadership and Scholarship

It is likely that you will have teaching roles in one category and possibly two. It is the rare candidate, usually an educator by profession, who will have data to present in all 3 categories. The Committee does not expect you to have roles or impact data in all 3 categories.

We encourage candidates to speak with faculty in their own departments for examples of their teaching portfolios. Most candidates in Epidemiology, for example, find that previous Epi faculty portfolio designs are more helpful than Surgery faculty portfolio examples, and vice-versa.

3. Letters

In addition to the letters or recommendation that your department will request at your direction from colleagues in support of your candidacy for promotion, you may provide the names of faculty to write letters specifically in support of your teaching portfolio. The Committee will accept up to 3 Student/Mentee Forms from each category of learner that you teach or advise, including students, graduate trainees and faculty. It is best to consider submitting Student/Mentee Forms or letters in support of your Teaching Portfolio if you lack learner evaluation data for any important teaching role.

4. Resources

Faculty members are encouraged to speak with their department APT contacts and their department Chair as early as possible in this process.

Here is an SOM-generated sample of a Teaching Portfolio - Clinical Faculty

Here is an SOM-generated sample of a Teaching Portfolio - Research Faculty

Here is a Department of Anesthesiology generated Teaching Portfolio

UMSOM Teaching Portfolio Resources

How to access student evaluations of your performance as a teacher