Are you a medical educator and can’t quite illustrate the importance and impact of your work in your CV?
I’ve always had this problem when compiling and updating my CV. The traditional CV format caters especially to academic physicians who are active in public service, traditional research, and leadership positions. What about the great procedural course that you ran with stellar evaluations? What about the lecture you gave at a national conference?
A few years ago, I discovered the existence of an Educator’s Portfolio. This is a supplementary document to your CV. It allows me to document scholarly activity in education and to provide reflection on my career path. There are variants of the portfolio template, but the overarching theme is to highlight an individual’s educational mission, efforts, project evaluations, and publications.
The UCSF Educator’s Portfolio focuses on your strengths in the five prime areas of education:
- Direct Teaching
- Curriculum Development, Instructional Design and Assessment of Learner Performance
- Advising and Mentorship
- Educational Administration and Leadership
- Educational Research
A great resource is Dr. Gloria Kuhn’s 2004 article in Academic EM. From Wayne State, Gloria’s a great resource for anything related to education (and actually life in general, if you ask me.).
What I learned most from this new format for presenting your academic pursuits is the importance of obtaining evaluations. This means getting detailed evaluations of the course that you taught, of the lecture you gave, or of the online module that you built. As an academic faculty member, assessment of your product/project is crucial in showing your Promotions and Tenure committee that you are worth promoting. Creating a cool product per se is not as valuable. Wish someone had told me that early in my career…
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