How to document teaching in your medical portfolio

Why teaching evidence matters

Teaching is one of the few portfolio themes with value at every stage of a medical career. In the Foundation Programme it is a named capability: FPC 10, "Teaching the teacher", under HLO 2 (a valuable member of the healthcare workforce). Beyond foundation, many specialty application self-assessment frameworks include domains for teaching experience and teaching qualifications, and consultant appraisal continues to ask about it. The same documented session can serve all of these - but only if it was documented.

The failure mode is almost never a shortage of teaching. Most junior doctors teach regularly: students on the ward, peers at induction, departmental presentations. The failure mode is that none of it is written down, so at ARCP or application time it cannot be evidenced and effectively did not happen.

What counts as teaching

Teaching evidence is broader than formal lectures. Depending on what a given framework asks for, all of the following are documentable teaching activity:

• →Bedside and ward-based teaching of medical students or more junior colleagues.
• →Small-group tutorials, case presentations and journal clubs you led.
• →Departmental or regional teaching sessions and lectures.
• →Simulation teaching, skills sessions and OSCE examining or marking.
• →Designing teaching materials: e-learning modules, question banks, teaching programmes you organised.
• →Mentoring and near-peer schemes with a defined teaching role.

Distinguish delivering teaching from attending it. Attendance at mandatory teaching is its own (often required) evidence stream; what frameworks score as "teaching" is teaching you delivered or organised.

The Developing the Clinical Teacher SLE

For foundation doctors, the e-portfolios (Horus in England, Turas in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) include a dedicated SLE form for teaching: Developing the Clinical Teacher (DCT). An observer - typically a senior colleague present at your session - completes structured feedback on your teaching, and the form becomes portfolio evidence you can map to FPC 10.

What to record for every session

Whatever the setting, a teaching entry is reusable years later if it captures the facts a future form will ask for:

1. Date, title and format of the session (bedside, tutorial, lecture, simulation, e-learning).
2. Audience and numbers: who you taught, how many, and at what level.
3. Your role: sole teacher, co-teacher, organiser, examiner.
4. Preparation you did and materials you produced - attach the slides or handout.
5. Feedback collected, and one line on what you would change next time.
6. Whether the session was part of a series or programme, and whether you organised that programme.

Collecting feedback that strengthens the evidence

Structured feedback turns "I taught" into evidence of quality. A short standard form (paper or online) with a handful of rating questions and a free-text box, used consistently across your sessions, lets you honestly summarise results later. Keep the raw forms or export; summarise counts and themes in the entry itself. Never invent or embellish feedback figures - an honest "12 of 14 attendees returned forms" is exactly what assessors expect to see.