Lessons from a Course Portfolio

While I have, to be sure, thought about the courses I teach, including the one profiled here a great deal over the years, having gone through the exercise of completing a course portfolio has led me to think about the courses I teach in a somewhat different way. While every course has a goal or goals, for me these often remained unarticulated. The portfolio has encouraged me to think more explicitly about course goals, framed in terms of what I would like the students to know, what, for example, I would like them to say they learned in the class should they be asked once the course is ended. The portfolio has also forced me to think more explicitly about assessment in relationship to goals, that is, the need to develop assessment strategies that unambiguously reflect students’ success in mastering course goals. While my examinations and papers have always reflected course content, this is not necessarily the same as course goals, although the two certainly overlap. While one does not need to have participated in the peer review exercise to think of their course as a journey, where you as the instructor are piloting students along a pathway to a new and exciting destination, it was the peer review exercise that introduced this idea to me. Each lecture, discussion topic, examination, project, and paper can be thought of as sign posts or route signs that will carry students to the "aha" experience, where everything comes together and students see how the individual components fit together to form the larger whole. Lastly, it is intriguing to think of one’s course as an scholarly investigation, where the task is to secure evidence to establish that students have indeed internalized the principal lessons the course was designed to convey. For one who has never done exceptionally well in generating high student evaluations, I am hopeful that assessment focused on student learning will reveal that students do indeed learn something in my courses. This first effort at assessing student learning suggests that they do.