Guidelines for Submitting Tenure and Promotion Portfolios

The Office of the Provost will communicate in early fall the timeline and method for submission. Candidates for tenure and/or promotion are welcome to begin gathering materials ahead of this announcement. The office is committed to providing a submission process that works for a variety of organization methods and is adaptable to each field of expertise. If you have any questions, please contact vpaa@ric.edu.

Required Portfolio Contents

Key Considerations

• The portfolio should reflect your professional career at RIC as accurately and comprehensively as possible.
• Talk to your Department Chair, Dean, and other senior faculty about how to construct this portfolio, what to include, and how to format the information.
• It is imperative to focus on the review period of relevance, i.e., either the period since you joined RIC at rank or the period since your last promotion at RIC.
• Prior work can be referenced for context but is not formally part of your review for promotion and tenure.

Table of Contents and Cover Letter

• Table of Contents: Paginate the portfolio, list the major sections of the portfolio with starting pages, and separate the sections in the portfolio with tabs to assist the reviewers.
• Cover Letter: Provide an overview of your career at RIC and any related information that is not obvious in your Curriculum Vitae (CV) or other objective materials. This can be a separate document or the first section of a combined document that includes the narratives below.

Professional Narrative

• Provide a narrative on your teaching, research or other scholarship, service at RIC, professional service, outreach, and other professional activities, either in separate sections of one narrative or separate narratives for each major area above.

Curriculum Vita

• Provide a comprehensive and up-to-date CV that lists all of your professional activities for your entire professional career.
• It is strongly recommended that you annotate your CV; that is, provide guidance on key elements that may not be apparent from the factual information. For example, in a list of publications you might annotate each publication (particularly if it is multi-authored) as to your role, how the publication reflects your core scholarship, and the overall importance of that publication in your compendium of total scholarly output.
• You should also indicate which publications resulted from your scholarship while at RIC (as opposed to a publication that resulted from work prior to joining RIC). Likewise annotate any grant funding with information about the funding, what project it relates to, and the products that resulted from that funding.

Supporting Documentation

Include materials that demonstrate your Teaching Effectiveness and Professional Competence:

• Teaching-related Materials: Include a comprehensive list of courses taught, and distinguish those in your department/program versus courses outside your department, school or program; include student evaluations and peer evaluations of your teaching; workshops and courses taken, and/or additional earned credentials related to developing your teaching expertise.  See below for other examples of documentation.
• Professional Competence-related Materials: This section should include evidence of both research, publication, grants or creativity and performance in the fine arts; leadership and service to the College; professional improvement; and leadership and service to community, state and nation. Include copies of relevant publications reflecting your research, conference proceedings, URLs for web sites reflecting scholarly output, book chapters and books or monographs, examples or images of performance or visual arts, etc. that reflect the output of your scholarly activities.  Include evidence of any coursework, workshops, certificate credentials and degrees, and other evidence of professional development. Include relevant materials that demonstrate outreach, service to professional organizations, and other professional activities.

A Note of Caution: Candidates are cautioned against compiling large appendices of materials or including extraneous materials (thank-you notes, meeting minutes, correspondence, newspaper articles, etc.) that do not directly document your professional activities.