The Learning Portfolio: Reflective Practice for Improving Student Learning (Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education (Paperback)) - Softcover

Zubizarreta, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0470388471 ISBN 13: 9780470388471

Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 2009

Synopsis

The learning portfolio is a powerful complement to traditional measures of student achievement and a widely diverse method of recording intellectual growth. This second edition of this important book offers new samples of print and electronic learning portfolios. An academic understanding of and rationale for learning portfolios and practical information that can be customized. Offers a review of the value of reflective practice in student learning and how learning portfolios support assessment and collaboration. Includes revised sample assignment sheets, guidelines, criteria, evaluation rubrics, and other material for developing print and electronic portfolios.

About this title

About the Author

John Zubizarreta is professor of English and director of honors and faculty development at Columbia College, South Carolina. He is a frequent conference presenter and consultant, and he has mentored educators internationally on developing teaching, learning, and administrative portfolios.

From the Back Cover

Praise for The Learning Portfolio, Second Edition

"John Zubizarreta understands students, faculty, and teaching and learning. This book will help both novices and senior faculty to use portfolios to increase their own understanding and to enrich their students' learning."
―Wilbert McKeachie, author, McKeachie's Teaching Tips

"With fourteen new chapters featuring exemplary uses of learning portfolios, this second edition is like a brand new book. But it preserves all the recommendations for implementing learning portfolios that made the first edition so useful to faculty."
―Linda B. Nilson, director, Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation, Clemson University, and author, Teaching at Its Best and The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map

"The Learning Portfolio represents a clear, organized, reflective, and effective way to direct and document student learning. It is a must-have for any faculty member or university administrator concerned about demonstrating attainment of important learning outcomes, and for faculty developers assisting instructional staff in designing effective and engaging courses."
―James E. Groccia, director, Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, Auburn University, and former president, Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education

"The Learning Portfolio provides a credible tool for assessing and improving student learning―critical aspects when documenting program and institutional effectiveness. John Zubizarreta's clear and pragmatic discussion of the learning portfolio empowers all who care about student learning to succeed in ways that can make a transformative difference in the lives of students."
―Mary Lou Higgerson, vice president for academic affairs and dean, Baldwin-Wallace College, and coauthor, Effective Leadership Communication

"If we want students to become self-directing learners, they must become more aware of themselves as learners. There is no other tool that has more power to contribute to this process than well-designed learning portfolios."
―L. Dee Fink, author, Creating Significant Learning Experiences

"John Zubizarreta understands students, faculty, and teaching and learning. This book will help both novices and senior faculty to use portfolios to increase their own understanding and to enrich their students' learning."
—Wilbert McKeachie, author, McKeachie's Teaching Tips

"With fourteen new chapters featuring exemplary uses of learning portfolios, this second edition is like a brand new book. But it preserves all the recommendations for implementing learning portfolios that made the first edition so useful to faculty."
—Linda B. Nilson, director, Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation, Clemson University, and author, Teaching at Its Best and The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map

"The Learning Portfolio represents a clear, organized, reflective, and effective way to direct and document student learning. It is a must-have for any faculty member or university administrator concerned about demonstrating attainment of important learning outcomes, and for faculty developers assisting instructional staff in designing effective and engaging courses."
—James E. Groccia, director, Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, Auburn University, and former president, Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education

"The Learning Portfolio provides a credible tool for assessing and improving student learning—critical aspects when documenting program and institutional effectiveness. John Zubizarreta's clear and pragmatic discussion of the learning portfolio empowers all who care about student learning to succeed in ways that can make a transformative difference in the lives of students."
—Mary Lou Higgerson, vice president for academic affairs and dean, Baldwin-Wallace College, and coauthor, Effective Leadership Communication

"If we want students to become self-directing learners, they must become more aware of themselves as learners. There is no other tool that has more power to contribute to this process than well-designed learning portfolios."
—L. Dee Fink, author, Creating Significant Learning Experiences

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Learning Portfolio

Reflective Practice for Improving Student LearningBy John Zubizarreta

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2009 John Zubizarreta
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-38847-1

Chapter One

An Overview of Student Learning Portfolios

THE CONCEPT OF THE STUDENT PORTFOLIO has been widely known and implemented for some time in academic fields such as English, journalism, and communications. Similarly, portfolios have been a staple form of documentation of performance skills in the fine arts, providing students and teachers with a method for displaying and judging evidence of best practice and samples of the full range of students' talents. Another popular application has been to provide a device for demonstrating the value of experiential learning or for assessing credit for prior learning in a program of adult education. Some portfolios are shared by students and faculty advisers for the purpose of academic advising and career counseling, a use strongly advocated by the National Academic Advising Association, which provides on its Web site (www.nacada.ksu.edu/AAT/NW26_1.htm) a rationale and a number of sample guidelines for advising portfolios as well as models derived from institutions such as Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, the Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Denver (www.nacada.ksu.edu/Clearinghouse/AdvisingIssues/portfolio examples.htm). Also, in business and teacher education, portfolios have been used as effective tools for career preparation. The contribution in this volume of Drexel University's LeBow College of Business portfolio project is a good example of the practical benefits of a thoughtful portfolio system. In teacher education, for accreditation purposes, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education advocates the portfolio model as an effective tool for showcasing a representative breadth of acquired skills for professional success and career preparation, using specified licensure competencies and professional standards as benchmarks against which to measure achievements signified by portfolio artifacts (www.ncate.org).

Such applications predominately have targeted the portfolio's efficacy in gathering judiciously selected products of student work to display content mastery or job readiness. Writing portfolios, for example, have been used generously in composition, creative writing, and other types of communication courses to present a diverse profile of a student's creative and technical skills. Used in this way, the portfolio is an enhancement to a writing, speech, business, leadership, or computer-information-systems teacher's comprehensive assessment of a student's growth during a particular course or at the end of an enrichment program, an academic major, or a general education core with goals, objectives, and competencies in writing and other areas. Undoubtedly, the portfolio is both an intellectually stimulating process and a product with keen utilitarian properties.

Yet, despite the history of portfolios in certain disciplines, the portfolio approach to gauging student accomplishments and growth in learning-while not entirely new in higher education-has historically received more attention in the K-12 arena. In English and a few other disciplines in college classes, portfolios, journals, and more recently, digital storytelling strategies have been employed with some regularity, but remarkably, higher education has lagged behind the grade schools in innovating and refining such persuasive learning tools. Today, following the groundswell of interest in teaching, administrative, course, and institutional portfolios, learning portfolios are attracting significant attention in college and university settings. Now the numerous Web sites that provide information on portfolios-and that especially offer rich and diverse models of how electronic or digital portfolios are used for multiple purposes-are coming predominantly from colleges and universities around the world. Countries such as Australia, Britain, Canada, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, and of course, the United States-just to name a few-are home to institutions with student portfolio programs designed to help with systematic learning-outcomes assessment plans. Arter and Spandel (1992);Gordon(1994);Wright, Knight, and Pomerleau (1999);and Cambridge (2001) are a few print resources that demonstrate the interest in portfolios in higher education. Helen Barrett (www.electronicportfolios. com); the ePortConsortium (www.eportconsortium.org); the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (www.merlot. org); the Electronic Portfolio Action and Communication network (http:// eportfolio.merlot.org); the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research (http://ncepr.org); EDUCAUSE (www.educause.edu); the Europortfolio (www.europortfolio.org) consortium; EPICS-2 (www.eportfolios. ac.uk), a collaboration of several UK institutions dedicated to e-portfolio development, with strong emphasis on medical education; and other Web sites are among the numerous sources for online information on electronic portfolios in colleges and universities around the world. Following Seldin's (2004) work on teaching portfolios, learning portfolios are clearly now main-stream in higher education.

A Focus on Learning

In addition to the diverse applications already mentioned, Burch (1997) suggests a few other uses of portfolios: "They can reveal, in the aggregate, the state of an academic program; they can provide valuable insights into what students know and how they construct that knowledge; they can provide institutional barometers, if you will, that suggest programmatic highs and lows, strengths and weaknesses" (p. 263). His comment hints that often what is left out of the formula in student portfolios is an intentional focus on learning, the deliberate and systematic attention not only to skills development and career readiness but also to a student's self-reflective, metacognitive appraisal of how and, more importantly, why learning has occurred. This is not to assert, of course, that learning does not happen at all when portfolios are used only as collection and organizing devices, that a student does not benefit simply from the thoughtful act of choosing representative samples of accomplished work and making sense of the materials as a display. But more significant learning is likely to occur if the student is encouraged to come to terms self-consciously over the duration of an academic endeavor-for example, a semester course, the culmination of an honors program, the achievement of general education goals, or the completion of a degree-with essential questions about learning itself:

How have such products as those collected in a portfolio over time contributed to significant higher-order learning? What has the student learned from the process of generating the work and from collecting it, selecting it, analyzing its value, pondering its integration and future applications? How does the work fit into a larger framework of lifelong learning that goes beyond simply completing graded assignments? Why was the work valuable in the student's overall cognitive, social, ethical, spiritual development?

Imagine how such an opportunity for mentored, critical reflection and for immediate assessment of learning grounded in direct outcomes or products can benefit all our students, especially after carefully and intentionally integrating reflective learning pedagogies into our courses and programs of study. Imagine, too, how such work can benefit an academic organization looking for ways to demonstrate the value-added dimension of its influence on students' learning. More importantly, imagine the impact of such an opportunity on students' appreciation for and understanding of the visible, recorded, shared evidence of the outcomes of their reflective learning.

Such directed probing of the sources, coherence, and worth of learning-especially when combined with the power of collaboration and mentoring in making learning a recorded and shared community endeavor-is sometimes missing from the model of the student portfolio as simply an individual repository of selected artifacts. To the point, analogously, the same vital components frequently are lacking in what many faculty describe as their teaching or professional portfolios, prodigious folders that often are not much more than elaborate personnel files submitted confidentially at critical junctures in a professor's professional career.

Student portfolios, too, largely have been used to collect and evaluate students' work at key points in their progress, usually at the end of an academic endeavor; in a sense, the portfolio has been used primarily as a capstone product, sometimes even unintentionally minimizing the crucial learning process along the way in favor of the finished document, especially when the shine of fancy covers and graphics or the glitz of digital enhancement becomes the student's focus, luring the teacher into similar pitfalls. Today, although exciting and positive innovations in electronic portfolios are increasingly emphasizing the importance of reflection (see Chen and Ittelson's piece in this volume, detailing the growth of the Electronic Portfolio Action and Communication network, dedicated to electronic portfolios), the allure and dazzle of electronic media make the temptation toward product rather than process even greater. In "Costs and Benefits of Electronic Portfolios in Teacher Education: Student Voices," for example, Wetzel and Strudler (2006) report how easily even a well-intended focus on reflection in portfolio systems can go awry when students quickly decode the perceived real emphasis on product and "busywork" in a portfolio:

The value of reflection differed somewhat from site to site depending on the emphasis, but generally, teacher candidates reported that the connections they made to state and national teaching standards helped them to understand the standards and the attributes of well-prepared teachers. They also thought that reflecting on their teaching practice helped them learn from their experiences. However, the sentiment was almost universal that there could be too much of a good thing and that they were being "reflected to death." They recommended that faculty modify the logistics for reflections; for example, the reflection should be embedded within the artifact or inserted separately within the EP [electronic portfolio] system. Requiring both, however, led to redundancy and overload.... There was also evidence ... of what might be described as elaborate, hyperlinked checklists in which faculty assess the EPs based on completeness rather than the quality of the content. In instances where students perceived this to be the case, they expressed great frustration in having worked hard on a component of their portfolio and feeling that it was not even read by faculty. (p. 77)

Nevertheless, in truth, it would be difficult today to find a portfolio system that does not incorporate some element of critical reflection, even if the reflection amounts to rudimentary and form-generated statements about individual exhibits collected in a portfolio developed exclusively as a performance assessment or as a "vitae on steroids," as an acerbic voice once quipped informally about portfolio-based evaluation. One need not be so deprecatingly witty, however, because simply collecting artifacts for presentation and review purposes has the intrinsic worth of at least helping students organize the outcomes of their efforts in a way that communicates accumulated skills and learning. Add a reflective component, and learning portfolios, like teaching portfolios (Seldin, 2004), become "part of a process of monitoring ongoing professional growth," encouraging "greater self-understanding" and serving as "effective tools for goal setting and self-directed learning"; they become, in short, "part of a learning process" (Campbell, Melenyzer, Nettles, & Wyman, 2000, p. 14).

The authors just cited-writing about portfolios with "a focus on product," largely from the utilitarian angle of how such documents serve as an "employment or credentialing tool" for certification in teacher education-also make the strong point that in a well-managed portfolio project, students should realize that their effort is not simply to construct "a scrapbook of college course assignments and memorabilia" (p. 2). Instead, even in a "presentation" portfolio (which the authors distinguish from a "working" portfolio), the product is also a process and should be construed as an "organized documentation of growth and achievement that provides tangible evidence of the attainment of professional knowledge, skills, and dispositions. Each portfolio is goal-driven, original, and reflective" (p. 13).

Survey Responses

Citing responses from a survey administered to students in a teacher-certification program, Campbell et al. (2000) demonstrate how students evidently "became aware of the full range of benefits of portfolio work" (p. 14):

Question: How have you benefited from the process of portfolio development?

"It has helped me to build confidence in myself as an educator." "Portfolio development has helped me to identify my strengths and weaknesses...." "I have become more aware of what future employers may be looking for...." "It is nice to be able to look back at everything I have accomplished throughout my college career." "The portfolio has helped me become more organized. It has helped me set goals and achieve them. I have a basis for my future education." "By having specific outcomes to accomplish I am able to see exactly what areas of preparation I need to work on...." "The development of the portfolio has helped me see the importance of my work." "It made me strive to do my best work possible." "It helped me see the value of the assignments that I have completed in my classes. I take away more meaning from my work." "It has shown me how what I have learned all fits together." "The portfolio development itself is a means of becoming professional...." "I feel a sense of accomplishment.... Being able to see your own growth and achievement is very exciting." (p. 15, from Dorothy M. Campbell et al., Portfolio and Performance Assessment in Teacher Education, published by Allyn and Bacon, Boston, MA. Copyright (c) 2000 by Pearson Education. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Other students speak their minds about the value of reflective portfolios just as convincingly. For this volume, three students from Agnes Scott College have contributed a creative piece formatted as a video interview produced for a portfolio assignment, and one of the students offers the following insights, revealing the utility of portfolio work in fostering mature thinking and judgment:

The development of my views of a liberal arts education and what it means to me, my future, and who I am did not even become clear to me until I began the process of reflection. As a part of the project, we wrote reflections on the entire three-month journey.... In fact, this very essay for this volume has allowed me to step back and view the project objectively. While writing, I have realized how the project has changed me. The process has been ongoing, and we have shown the video at orientation events, to friends and family, and as a part of a presentation on our work open to the campus. Each time I have presented the video and spoken about the process, my understanding of my learning has become more refined through reflection. (See "The E-portfolio and Liberal Arts Education at Agnes Scott College" in this volume.)

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Learning Portfolioby John Zubizarreta Copyright © 2009 by John Zubizarreta. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0470388471
• ISBN 13: 9780470388471
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 392