Peter Seldin and Anker Publishing have done it again: the seeds of their partnership dating back to the early nineties have led to another title which promises to reach the status of 'best-seller'in 2004 and beyond. The Third Edition of The Teaching Portfolio is billed as "A Practical Guide to Improved Performance and Promotion/Tenure Decisions". And a practical and thorough guide it is indeed.

First and foremost, the guide relies on the unique field experience and the resultant credibility of Seldin himself, who has registered hundreds of visits to colleges to introduce the teaching portfolio, personally mentoring some 500 professors in the portfolio writing task The second key to the predicted success of this publication stems from the fact that Professor Seldin has successfully involved 11 chapter contributors to flesh out various aspects of the use of the portfolio in higher education. And, finally, the Third Edition boasts 22 new portfolios submitted by professors from a wide variety of disciplines and institutional settings. The result is that even those with the First Edition on their shelves may well go ahead and purchase the Third Edition given the amount of new material included in the guide.

As was the case in the First Edition, Seldin writes a brief introduction to the teaching portfolio, referring specifically to its overall preparation and use as well as providing advice on how to choose items to include in the document. The first part of the book also includes a section titled "Answers to Common Questions About the Teaching Portfolio".

Susan Kahn contributes an important chapter on electronic teaching portfolios, situating her advice in the context of "making good work public." Although professor Kahn is to be congratulated for the excellent content of this chapter, the miniature print reproductions, or "screen images," taken from individual portfolios are too tiny to be of interest.

The third section of The Teaching Portfolio tells seven separate tales of how institutions struggled with the challenge of introducing the portfolio in contexts ranging from a campus in shambles to a campus intent on raising the bar on teaching excellence. These stories provide a variety of perspectives and remind us that there is more than one way to introduce a good idea, such as working through the academic departments rather than attempting a campus-wide initiative from the start. Readers will enjoy learning about the highly varied experiences, from New York to Texas, of the contributing authors.

John Zubizarreta contributes a section on strategies for updating and improving the teaching portfolio, including key points of revision as he offers the example of his own portfolio to illustrate this process.
Since many readers will already be familiar with the portfolio concept, the energetic Professor Zubizaretta's advice, designed to ensure that the portfolio remain dust free, dynamic, and current, is indeed welcome and relevant!

The last section of The Teaching Portfolio guide consists of 22 recent portfolios, listed alphabetically from Accounting through Theatre (too bad there was no contribution from Zoology!) and once again representing US institutions of higher education from many States (as well as one portfolio by a professor who recently moved to a Canadian university). Teachers will likely jump to examine a portfolio in their academic field or discipline. This is a natural tendency, but Seldin and other experts often suggest that the best ideas for approaches and topics may well be found in portfolios in fields other than one's own. As might be expected, the quality of the writing in the portfolios varies from very sharp to crying out for a sweeping edit. But these are real professors struggling with real educational issues and their sample portfolios give us a broad overview of the state of the art.

A writing team including Dr. Christopher Knapper of Queen's University first advocated the concept of the "teaching dossier" in a guide written for the Canadian Association of University Teachers in 1980. As it turns out, the guide was a decade ahead of its time! But around 1990 the idea re-surfaced, and it is encouraging to note the sustained interest in the teaching portfolio concept as a means to improve teaching and to provide evidence of effectiveness in the context of tenure and promotion. When I spoke with Peter Seldin in the mid nineties, the author, speaker and educational developer described himself as a kind of Johnny Appleseed of the teaching portfolio, sowing seeds across the country. Almost a decade later, as Professor Seldin pursues his mission in institutional settings and in print, his labor of love continues to bear fruit.

Alan Wright,
Université du Québec