Practitioner's Portfolio

Peter J. Taylor
Program in Critical & Creative Thinking
Graduate College of Education
University of Massachusetts, Boston
September 1999

Every process in an educational institution can be a teaching/learning interaction, an opportunity for all parties both to teach and to learn from each other. In this spirit, I prepared this Fourth Year Report not only to provide the material to be used for the formal report to the College and University, but also to stimulate faculty members in the Critical & Creative Thinking Program (CCT) and Graduate College of Education (GCOE) to learn how better to foster my work, which includes responding in ways from which I can best learn. To meet both the formal and teaching/learning goals, the written form I have chosen for the report is a Practitioner's Portfolio. This consists of a personal statement, a review of my courses, and a set of exhibits. I welcome dialogue around the different components of the Portfolio to help readers appreciate work in areas or directions unfamilar to them, and to facilitate clarification and revision of my CCT and GCOE colleagues' various assessments, goals, and expectations, and of my own.
Submitting a Portfolio also corresponds to my view that formal reviews should attend to process as well as product. That is, for reviewers to be confident in continued effectiveness of a colleague, they should have evidence of the faculty member's on-going process of assessment and development of research, teaching, and responding to institutional challenges, and of cross-fertilization between those three aspects of a scholar's work.
Table of Contents

Personal Statement:
FURTHERING CRITICAL THINKING, ESPECIALLY ABOUT ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY
This statement can stand alone as a summary of my work and future plans, but is better read with reference to full Practitioner's Portfolio. Footnotes in the statement refer reviewers to my publications, sections in the Practitioner's Portfolio, and other sources.
I. COURSES
For each course taught in 1998-99 I include a cover page that reviews the original objectives for the course, changes made, and future plans. A link is included to the syllabus. Not included on the website are a summary of the GCOE evaluation and the originals of my own course evaluations. For current and future new courses, there is a statement of objectives and a draft syllabus.
II. EXHIBITS
These have been selected to illustrate important characteristics, themes, and products of my work. Given my immediate audience in CCT and GCOE, these are organized around four overall pedagogical goals introduced in the statement of teaching philosophy that leads off the exhibits. Each section and each exhibit is introduced in a cover page.
ATTACHMENTS
1. Curriculum Vitae
2. Annual Faculty Review, 1998-99 [not included on web site]
3. P/reprints of articles prepared or published since 1998, plus a selection of previous publications.[see C.V.]