Common Ground A Course Portfolio Approach Josh Tenenberg

Common Ground: A Course Portfolio Approach Josh Tenenberg University of Washington, Tacoma jtenenbg@u. washington. edu ACE 2006 Conference 1

Teaching vs. Wildnerness Camping • “Leave no Trace” is great for wilderness camping … … but a bad idea for teaching: “Aside from his syllabi and fading memories, he had no real record of what happened in those award winning courses” (Huber, 2002) 2

Disciplinary Commons: Program Objectives • To have great conversations about teaching among people who love to teach. • To create a community of practice by situating these conversations in a single geographic region within a single discipline. • To talk across institutional boundaries. • To develop as reflective practitioners, individually, mutually, and collectively. • To help one another become better teachers. 3

Disciplinary Commons: Program Structure • Monthly meetings between 10 -20 Computer Science faculty within a single geographic region during 2005 -06: one cohort in England (led by Sally Fincher), one cohort in Washington state. • Sessions focused on teaching and learning in our courses. • Each participant completes a Course Portfolio on a course they teach during 0506 academic year. • Portfolios are the vehicle, not the destination. • Project websites: US: http: //depts. washington. edu/comgrnd/ UK: http: //www. cs. kent. ac. uk/people/staff/saf/dc/ 4

Purpose of the Course Portfolio • The purpose of the course portfolio “is in revealing how teaching practice and student performance are connected with each other” (Bernstein, 1998). • The course portfolio is a set of documents that “focuses on the unfolding of a single course, from conception to results” (Hutching, 1998) 5