Capturing scholarly inquiry into learning: Teaching Portfolios
Tuesday, March 3, 11:45-1:15 in Buntrock 142
Dan Bernstein, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Kansas
(co-sponsor: Department of Psychology and the Office of Institutional Research and Evaluation)
In this session, Dan Bernstein will show examples of course portfolios that make learning by instructors and by students visible to colleagues. As he explains the session, "faculty members create these web-based documents to represent their goals, methods, students' performances, and lessons learned. Taken as a whole this work demonstrates how faculty members can treat their everyday teaching as a form of intellectual inquiry into successful learning. When the inquiry and its results are made public, then other scholars can use the lessons learned, expand the practices reported, and comment on what is learned by both students and faculty members."
Discussion will include both the practicalities of creating such representations within an academic job, and the merits and drawbacks of the scholarly inquiry metaphor.
SUGGESTED REFERENCES:
Bernstein, D., Burnett, A.N., Goodburn, A. and Savory, P. (2006). Making teaching and learning visible: Course portfolios and the peer review of teaching. Bolton, MA: Anker.
Bernstein, D. and Bass. R. (2005) "The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning" Academe, 91(4), 37-43.
Dan Bernstein received an A.B. in psychology from Stanford University in 1968 and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at San Diego in 1973. He was a Professor of Psychology at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln from 1973 until 2002, when he became Director or the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Kansas. He is also a Professor of Psychology at KU.
Dan served from 1999 to 2003 as Director of a five-university project for implementation of faculty fellowships to generate peer reviews of teaching materials. His recent writing has focused on representation of the intellectual work in teaching, especially through the external review of electronic course portfolios centered on student work. He works with colleagues from many fields of study in developing ways to showcase the quality of their student work and the practices that have helped that work emerge. (See http://www.cte.ku.edu/teachingInnovations/gallery/ and also http://www.courseportfolio.org/).
Dan has received numerous campus awards for teaching, he was a Charter Member of the University of Nebraska Academy of Distinguished Teachers, and he received the 2001 University of Nebraska Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Creativity Award. He was a Carnegie Scholar in 1998 and continues in the institutional program of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Recently he has received the J. Michael Young Academic Advising Award at KU and the Fred S. Keller Behavioral Education Award from Div. 25 of the American Psychological Association.
