Improving Reflection for Effective Eportfolios

1. Improving Reflection for Effective Eportfolios Karen Ramsay Johnson and Susan Kahn IUPUI

2. What is reflection? • Metacognition • Self-examination/self-assessment • Re-processing ideas to support understanding • Integration • Questioning assumptions • Perceiving multiple contexts or perspectives

3. Forms of Reflection • Account/analysis of a process • Review of progress • Goal-setting • Synthesis • Analysis of an experience • Analysis that connects a series of experiences • Analysis of an artifact • Analysis that connects a series of artifacts

4. Claims About Value of Reflection • Reflection helps students make knowledge by articulating connections • Reflection introduces students to new kinds of self-assessment that they carry into the rest of their lives • Reflection helps develop habits of reflective practice • Reflection supports deeper engagement in learning • Reflection provides evidence of learning not available by other means

5. Challenges • How do we teach students to reflect? (Some students lack experience with reflection) • Design and scaffolding • When and how often? • (Some) students’ view of their education as a series of discrete, unrelated courses (vs. “folio thinking”) • Balancing needs of stronger and weaker students

6. First-Generation Challenges • Fostering students’ ability to question preconceptions about the value of reflection • Modifying concepts appropriate for traditional students so that non-traditional students see the value of their non-academic experience • Maintaining first-generation students’ pride in their educational achievements while helping them form realistic expectations for the job market

7. E450: The Capstone Seminar • Two Components (incorporated into webfolio): • Career/Professional Development • English in the World/Global Citizenship

10. E450: The Capstone SeminarDesired Outcomes • Integrate learning • Articulate learning in terms meaningful to employers and other audiences • Use evidence to substantiate claims about abilities and skills • Foster metacognition and empowerment for learning • Build confidence in value of degree

11. Strategies: A multi-faceted approach to reflection Three Short reflections, peer-reviewed and revised: • Personal: an experience that is understood differently in the present • Textual Reflection: a transformative encounter with a text (loosely defined) • Career: Use of two or more artifacts to demonstrate skills relevant to job or further education Culminating reflection on English in the World • An extended reflection on students’ long term goals both professional and civic

12. Our strategies • Write short reflections before writing final • component reflection essay • Guided peer review • Rubric with discussion • Incorporate readings about metacognition and • reflection • Individual conferences

13. Lessons Learned • Successful reflective practice requires more than one course’s exposure • Some students are sincerely baffled by the whole concept of reflection • Students who are most challenged by reflection are usually those who also find it hard to question preconceptions • Students with double majors or minors are usually the most skilled at reflection • Students who take reflection most seriously emerge with greater confidence in the validity of their learning and in the value of their college degrees

14. “ I never thought there would be an overarching theme to my college career . . . . Through my work as an English major, which has included taking classes in literature and writing and linguistics and editing, I have realized that the one overarching theme is the power that words have to change the world; and as a Political Science major I have been blessed and cursed with the ability to see and understand those changes in a way that is sometimes heartbreakingly real . . . . There is a gift that English majors are given that we sometimes forget about and take for granted . . . it is our desire and ability to see everyone in the world as people with stories that can turn on a dime when one simple word is spoken to them or about them.”

15. Everybody has a story “Writing Invisible Indians created awareness in myself. Being an open-minded individual does not mean absence of judgment, moral perfection or color blindness. It is about being aware of other people. It’s about being honest with yourself about your own thoughts and being inquisitive about the viewpoints of others. It is easy to get caught up in ourselves and not realize that everybody has a different history and a different story. I think that is where English and literature are so powerful in the world. Everybody has a story to tell.”

16. Will This Thing Float? “If geography is the study of the world and its people, English is the study of people and their world….Part of the beauty of my Liberal Arts education is adaptability. Obviously, there is more than one way in which my ideas can be packaged….My message in ‘Justice is Blind’ is one that I could develop through writing a journalistic piece…What I am most grateful for, in my Liberal Arts education, is that I have not been armed with only a specific set of skills or molded and formed for one particular occupation…I may still be adrift at sea, but I have a damn good piece of wood to float on. “

17. Practice makes perfect? “People always say ‘practice makes perfect,’ but the truth is, it doesn’t. Practice only makes you a little better than you were previously. That is a distinction that I have had to come to terms with as a writer, and it is the hardest lesson that I have had to learn as a student of English.”

18. Contact Us Susan Kahn: skahn@iupui.edu Karen Johnson: kjohnso6@iupui.edu