Now is the time for mid-semester evaluations of your teaching; but what do you do with that feedback once you receive it? In addition to offering important corrective measures for the current semester, student feedback can form a key part of your teaching dossier for promotion and tenure.
This December, the University will be rolling out UDAcademe, an online hub for documenting all aspects of your career at UD.
Creating a teaching dossier is a major component of UDAcademe, where all documentation for promotion and tenure will reside. So what is a teaching dossier and how do you create one that showcases the success of your students?
Simply put, your teaching dossier is a combination of evidence (evaluations, assessments, rubrics, peer reviews) and narrative (a statement of teaching philosophy) that highlights your unique contributions to UD.
This article contains tips to highlight the major components of your teaching dossier.
Incorporating Student Responses:
Faculty often ask for advice about presenting student evaluations of teaching (SETs). Research has shown that student evaluations can be biased and problematic instruments (Bennett,1982).
We suggest using other tools to document student improvement, such as including assessments (with your rubrics) from the beginning, middle, and end of a semester. These forms of documentation can demonstrate that your students continue to build on what they are learning to meet your stated outcomes.
Another option is to create graphs from your gradebook to visually demonstrate the improvement in student scores over an entire course or an especially challenging unit.
Including special projects:
When you implement a unique activity, or create a particularly compelling contextual framework for student learning, you can highlight that in your teaching documents.
Our upcoming First Friday Roundtable, “Sticky Learning: Context and Feedback” (November 4 at 3:30 pm in Gore 208–Register) will provide many ideas for how to maximize student learning and gain real-time feedback on student progress. This is one of many programs that offer all instructors at UD the opportunity to develop best practices for effective teaching and meaningful learning.
Dossier design and presentation:
A teaching dossier is a personal document. The Center for Teaching and Assessment of Learning (CTAL) can help you create a compelling teaching dossier, including helping you develop or refine your statement of teaching philosophy, annotating student work to reflect achievement of learning outcomes, presenting your quantitative data visually, and much more.
