LSB History - Part 4
Portfolios in the School of Education
Paper Scrapbooks
For the past several years students in the School of Education have gathered together at the end of each semester to share paper based portfolios which consisted of pictures of their teaching and examples of student work into a scrapbook. The students would be organized into small groups where they would share their experiences with other students and a faculty member or host teacher. The purpose of these portfolios were to share and raise awareness of what the other students were doing as well to get some informal feedback from the faculty and teachers.
Those faculty who were heavily involved in the development and use of Dialogue believed that the inclusion of certain portions of the student’s coursework (particularly the rich conversations that were occurring in Dialogue) as part of the student’s portfolio would make the portfolio review a more rich experience as well as document the learning that occurred as successive years portfolios were compared.
Electronic Portfolio Concept Serves Many Gods
During the spring of 2004 the conceptual groundwork began to take shape of a piece of software that would use the conversation tool in Dialogue as a primary input to a portfolio system. One of the key pieces of functionality that the faculty wanted was a complex tagging system that students would use to help organize their work. By using the tagging system and reflecting on the meaning behind these tags, faculty believed that students would begin to see the connections between their classes the things that they learned. In order to accommodate the various use cases of the portfolio system (system wide reporting for accreditation purposes, formative reflection and feedback and summative evaluation of individual students), the tagging system would allow for the creation of system-wide tags (that could be used for reporting purposes) as well as a user centric set of tags that students could use to describe their own metadata.
Students would use the tagging system to self identify their own work (either from Dialogue or elsewhere) with the (as yet unformed) School of Education Proficiencies or their own conceptual framework. The students would be asked to reflect upon each application of a tag to their work and periodically publish their portfolio of artifacts, tags and reflections for review. Alternatively, students could publish a subset of their work and tags as a web based portfolio for audiences outside of the School of Education.It was believed that the new software would be the foundation of a new system of pedagogy, continuous program review and assessment as well as serve as an underpinning to student advisement. The system would allow students to select their own evidence and tell their own story and account for program assessment needs.
Reflection is a Proficiency
Concurrent with the requirements gathering process, the faculty were compelled to define themselves by articulating core learning objectives that they would use across all of its programs. The NCATE team was expected to examine the framework within which the college framed its activities and evaluated performance. It was revealed that a key outcome of student learning expected by faculty was “Critical Reflection and Explanation of Practice.”