Teaching portfolios: an effective strategy for faculty development in occupational therapy

The special challenge of the occupational therapy practitioner embracing the role of faculty member is discovering a formative process of continual improvement that will also serve as an authentic assessment of teaching and learning within the particular disciplinary boundaries of occupational therapy. Although other means achieve such complex aims, the teaching portfolio is a powerful tool for fostering reflective practice and for creating an ongoing record of substantial evidence. A teaching portfolio is an evidence-based written document in which a faculty member, working in collaboration with a mentor, concisely organizes selective details of teaching accomplishment and effort and uses such information to document his or her teaching enterprise. More importantly, the faculty member uses the information for reflective analysis, leading to improvement of teaching and student learning. The emphasis on reflection, analysis, evidence, and mentoring suggests that the teaching portfolio can set the stage for meaningful collaboration in a system of evaluation that is based appropriately on recorded evidence of improvement and demonstrated positive outcomes of student learning.