Thursday, March 13, 2008
Reflection and Self-Awareness
I can remember creating portfolios from first grade to senior year of high school. Portfolios always made me excited not only to track my progress, but also to have a finished product, a personal artifact, from that year in my life. The reflection at the end, however, always was a drag. I just wanted to be done with it already! I guess I was just struggling with the idea of critiquing my own work, especially the poorer-quality work from the beginning of the year. Now being students in the College of Ed, we get bombarded with reflection assignments. I realize the importance of self-awareness and progress today, but perhaps I can use my previous frustrations to connect with my future students. I can explain to them how difficult it can be to grade our own work or point out the flaws. At the same time, I can help them understand the PURPOSE of reflection, and that I want them to decide their grade based on effort and growth.
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2 comments:
What do you think made you hate the reflection so much? I never did portfolios in school, so I would really like to try and use this. However, I don't have the prior experience that you have, being a student involved with the portfolio process. Maybe if you can indentify and understand what made you hate the reflection, you could figure out how to teach it in a non-threatening, engaging way, so that your students will be just as excited to reflect as they were to create. It makes me think of Bloom's Taxonomy, how the highest level is evaluation. We need to teach our students how to evaluate and achieve that higher level of thinking, and I think that reflecting will definitely help build that ability.
Yea, I think the reflection part is a big element of the portfolios. Otherwise, the students can't really see what they are doing different than what they have done before. I think it will be hard, though, even after we tell them the purpose of it, to actually get them to see that and to care about what they have written. But maybe since it is a portfolio (and maybe other people will see it?) it will be an opportunity for the students to want to engage in their own work, and to really try to see what things they have improved on over time.
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