Goals and Strategies
Program Goals
The Education Scholar Program was designed to:
- Elevate teaching as a respected activity of health professions faculty through scholarly inquiry and development.
- Assist faculty in adopting successful learner-centered teaching methods.
- Promote the scholarship of teaching as integral to the faculty role.
- Help faculty master the skills necessary to document teaching/learning activities as part of their scholarly work.
- Contribute to improving the quality of teaching and learning in the health professions.
- Develop a community of “like-minded” educators committed to the advancement of teaching excellence.
- Expand the dialogue about teaching/learning among local faculty to the national level.
- Build a framework that will ultimately recognize teaching excellence as a positive factor in faculty rewards and careers.
Program Strategies
To help you meet the goals of the Education Scholar Program, information and learning experiences have been provided that will:
- Make current, relevant educational research and theory practical and accessible.
- Explain and model practical strategies that you can begin implementing in your teaching setting today.
- Alert you to publications, electronic resources, and education experts that will provide ongoing support for your professional development.
- Encourage you to interact with other health professions faculty who are interested in improving their teaching skills.
- Help you document your teaching experiences for the purposes of meeting continuing education, promotion, retention, or tenure requirements.
Teaching Portfolio
To support your personal and professional growth the Education Scholar Program assists you in building your own “teaching portfolio” to supplement the professional and institutional documentation required for tenure and promotion. A culminating exercise at the end of each module encourages you to "build your teaching portfolio" by synthesizing your experiences in the module and reflecting on the relevance of these experiences to your professional goals. A template is provided to guide you through this process and help you organize the contents of your portfolio. This feature was added in response to research conducted with health professions faculty, who described the importance of such documentation as a basis of external validation of their work.
Many college and universities now include the teaching portfolio as a requirement for annual performance evaluations and tenure and promotion reviews. Whether it is required or not, the teaching portfolio is an excellent tool for personal growth in reflecting upon student learning outcomes, teaching innovations and assessment of teaching.
Teaching Portfolio Resources
Teaching portfolios often include evidence of student learning, reflective philosophy statements, teaching goals, samples of student work, and feedback from students and colleagues. Many colleges and universities require this documentation as a source of evaluation for annual review, promotion, and/or tenure purposes.
A template for documenting the scholarship of your teaching is provided in each module of the Education Scholar curriculum. An excellent resource on this subject is:
Seldin P. The teaching portfolio: a practical guide to improved performance and promotion/tenure decisions. 2nd ed. Boston: Anker Publishing Company; 1997.
Additionally, you may wish to explore these Web sites to learn more about preparing teaching portfolios:
University of Minnesota: Teaching Portfolio
Pennsylvania State University Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching: Designing a Teaching Portfolio
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: The Knowledge Media Laboratory (KML)
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Center for Teaching and Learning: Teaching Portfolios
