Documenting Educational Impact in the Promotion Dossier with an Enhanced Curriculum Vitae

Abstract

Faculty with a career focus on education in the health professions often have difficulty representing their academic accomplishments for due consideration in promotion decisions at their respective institutions. This problem occurs because the traditional curriculum vitae (CV) format which is most often used tends to focus on peer-reviewed accomplishments easily presented in lists, such as grants and publications. In some institutions, an educator portfolio is required in place of or in addition to the CV. However, creating or reviewing such a narrative-oriented document takes large amounts of time-time that most faculty or reviewers do not have. Having to use an educator portfolio also calls out the educator as different from the traditional research faculty member. To address this problem, we propose the solution of an Enhanced CV. The Enhanced CV includes much of what is presented in an educator portfolio but in a format closer to the traditional CV. Unlike a traditional CV, the Enhanced CV includes categories inclusive of educational contributions (eg, teaching, mentoring, and course leadership) and includes brief descriptions and/or impact statements to clarify the significance of the listed accomplishments. The Enhanced CV has been adopted at two very different institutions, where evidence is accumulating regarding the viability of the Enhanced CV as a solution to educators' problem of presenting their accomplishments for promotions. The lessons learned from these institutions illustrate how the Enhanced CV can increase the ability of educators to present their accomplishments and advance in rank in their academic careers.

“Teaching Capital” – a sociological analysis of medical educator portfolios for promotion

“…The legitimacy of teaching portfolios has been intensively discussed. Advocators of portfolios argue that it is a means to place teaching on an equal footing with academic accomplishments (Hobson et al, 2022), and to support a scholarly and community-based approach to teaching (Pelger & Larsson, 2018). Critics, on the other hand, assert that the teaching portfolio mainly serves as a management tool for monitoring teaching (Buckridge, 2008;FitzPatrick & Spiller, 2010), and that the portfolio is merely an accountability mechanism that universities have introduced in a market-oriented environment in response to the growing quality assurance agenda in HE (Leggett & Bunker, 2006).…”

“…The main challenge is that portfolios are used both summatively and formatively (Buckridge, 2008). On the one hand, portfolios are used for tenure and promotion (Little-Wienert & Mazziotti, 2018) and thus for summative performance appraisal (Hobson et al, 2022;Trevitt et al, 2012). On the other hand, portfolios are used for learning (Pelger & Larsson, 2018;Tofade et al, 2014) and re ection (Hamilton, 2018;Tigelaar et al, 2006) providing a record of continuous learning and growing professionalism (Dalton et al, 2018;Tompkins & Paquette-Frenette, 2010).…”

“…While medical educator portfolios (MEP) have become more prevalent and recognized as a tool for developing and documenting teaching performance in Health Professions Education (Hobson et al, 2022;Stull et al, 2021), there are still many tensions, disagreements, and uncertainties involved in portfolio use (Harrison et al, 2022;Hong et al, 2021). Even so, there has been a striking lack of research focusing on how medical educators and higher education teachers try to decode what is the 'currency' of teaching performance, how to accommodate it, and how to document it in an MEP -especially when the MEP is used for promotion in the academic eld.…”

Growing Pains During COVID-19

“…JCEHP's first 2022 issue contains six articles concerned with faculty development that explore a diversity of topics: the development of a collaborative research culture in family medicine 1 ; an analysis of an interprofessional teaching academy from the perspective of social capital and organizational culture 2 ; the creation of an enhanced CV to better represent the efforts of clinical educator faculty during promotional processes 3 ; an active learning program designed to develop QI understanding and skills for hospital medicine faculty physicians 4 ; the way active learning alongside individualized remediation produces effective outcomes for physicians requiring competency improvements 5 ; and finally, the unique needs of female faculty in anesthesiology departments. 6 These articles serve as a reminder to maintain attention to ongoing historical issues within clinical education during these unusual times in the form of addressing the elision of meaningful engagement and development of skills in the pursuit of research products and outcomes 1 ; the need to understand and lever organizational culture and social capital for interprofessional teaching 2 ; the importance of representing clinical educator activities fairly and comprehensively in an efficient manner as part of the promotions process 3 ; the need to pursue active rather than passive learning approaches to increase QI capacity among physicians 4 ; the sometimes vexing problem of physician remediation 5 ; and finally, the gendered nature of faculty development itself. 6…”