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Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Department of Medical Education

Educator Portfolio

An Educator Portfolio documents your educational activities and is a useful tool in the faculty tenure and promotion process. It’s meant to be a living document that’s updated as you grow in your career as an educator.

Download a template spreadsheet to help you complete your portfolio.

You may not have information to fill out every section, but do your best to completely fill out the Educational Professional Development & Teaching Awards and Direct Teaching sections.

In addition to filling out the spreadsheet, please respond to the prompts below. Some correspond to tabs within the spreadsheet. For each section, limit your responses to one to two pages.

Direct Teaching

Briefly summarize how your teaching and evaluation methods have evolved over the course of your career and analyze the impact of your teaching and evaluation methods. Some things you may want to highlight are examples of:

  • How you have developed your instructional methods and how those have changed based on individual learning environments and personal learning styles
  • Learning settings that best match your strengths as a teacher
  • Innovation in teaching and/or evaluation
  • Use of technology for teaching and/or evaluation
  • Responding to the needs of learners
  • Scholarly approach to teaching and evaluation
  • What factors have represented significant impediments to good teaching and learning in your experience and how have you overcome those impediments

Curriculum Development

Summarize your approach to curriculum design by highlighting your best effort as an example. Be sure to include information on:

  • Educational purpose (goals/objectives)
  • Teaching/learning methods you've used and why (be sure to include references to any interactive computer programs, PBL cases, multimedia materials, etc.)
  • Curriculum/program feedback and evaluation methods and results
  • Impact of feedback and evaluations on curriculum/program

Advising & Mentoring

Describe your advising/mentoring philosophy and highlight in detail a few of your most productive and significant mentoring/advising relationships.

Educational Leadership

Summarize your personal approach to educational leadership/administration by highlighting your best effort as an example. Be sure to include:

  • Narrative description of the program
  • Detailed accounting of your role
  • Qualitative and quantitative data regarding your impact on the program

Educational Scholarship

List and, if possible, include copies of five of what you believe to be your most significant works of educational research and scholarship.

Separately, summarize your area(s) of scholarly interest and expertise in the educational sector.