Readers of Effective Teaching will all be able to benefit from this useful monograph. It is not so much an original work of analysis, much less theory, as it is a good review or compilation on the use of teaching portfolios and on the larger issue of university and college encouragement of improved teaching. Constructed in a slightly surprising (though never confusing) way, it focusses on teaching portfolios first and then on why they should be used and what changes are necessary for them to be used successfully.
To begin with the larger issues of campus climate and public attitude toward the professoriate, Murray makes the expected points about public disillusionment with the workloads and the perceived effectiveness of college faculty. This is related, of course, to the reward structures of the American higher education system and particularly to their warp towards research and publication as contrasted with (and often opposed to) teaching students in the classroom. Murray quotes scary figures which show that there is an inverse ratio between the amount of time faculty members spend teaching and their salaries, and shows that this relationship holds even at liberal arts colleges when their faculty are compared to counterparts at other types of institution. Thus, colleges and universities, willingly or not, use their reward structures to discourage faculty from doing what the public wants them to do--dedicate themselves to good teaching--and to encourage them to do scholarly research, to which the public is generally hostile or at best indifferent.
Thus, before it makes any sense to begin the challenging process of using teaching portfolios a prior change in institutional expectations is necessary.
Murray provides, in a chapter on "The Organizational Culture and Teaching Portfolios," an array of changes which are necessary:
These preliminaries (presumably) taken care of, faculty developers and university administrations may take full advantage of the sections of this book which explain, with copious reference to Peter Seldin, Tony Grasha, and other experts including ASU's Kate Brinko, how to begin a successful incorporation of teaching portfolios, how to sustain the effort, and how to get the most out of them.
There is a useful set of exercises to get started, consisting of questions the faculty members asks herself, starting with such fundamental ones as "What is the purpose of your portfolio?" There are pages on how best to evaluate portfolios, including a very salutary reminder that, since most faculty members have little or no training in pedagogy or assessment, those who evaluate portolios must be carefully selected and trained.
There are a number of suggestions of what should--and should not--appear in a teaching portfolio; and Murray's best chapter is probably the one on "Shaping and Institutional Definition of Good Teaching," which, like his others, draws on the best which has been published to provide copious examples. The Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education appear here; so do four or five other efforts to list the qualities of good or effective teaching.
Any reader of these pages will probably have reflected already on the difficulties of establishing a definition of good teaching which is both specific enough to be applicable and eclectic enough to welcome different types of good teaching. Murray's lists are very suggestive.
He concludes with a rich bibliography. This book is, rather than the scholarship of discovery, a fine illustration of Ernest Boyer's scholarship of integration, and fully justifies itself by the assistance it is able to provide to any faculty member, administrator, or institution of higher education serious about the improvement of college teaching.
Merritt Moseley,
UNC Asheville