1. Common Ground: A Course Portfolio Approach Josh Tenenberg University of Washington, Tacoma
ACE 2006 Conference

2. 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)

3. 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.

4. Disciplinary Commons: Program Structure
Monthly meetings between Computer Science faculty within a single geographic region during : 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:
UK:

5. 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)