5 POWERFUL tips to leverage ePortfolios for students' reflective-reflexive practice
5 POWERFUL tips to leverage ePortfolios for students' reflective-reflexive practice
An Electronic or Digital Portfolio (ePortfolio) is a digital space where evidence of learning and skill development is collected, stored, edited and showcased on an ongoing basis. ePortfolio contents are called Artefacts or evidence, and these artefacts can be in multi-media formats such as text, video, audio, images/photos, animation and hyperlinks.
ePortfolios are dynamic and provide multiple opportunities to showcase and organise students' artefacts depending on the purpose of the ePortfolio. Four main types of ePortfolios are:
- Learning/Process- work in progress with a focus on reflection, communication and feedback throughout the process (development, reflection, formative)
- Showcase- a collection of the best samples of work (presentation, formal, professional)
- Assessment- formal collection of sample work in fulfilment of learning outcomes or goals, curriculum objectives or agreed threshold of learning standards
- Hybrid- a combination of 2 or 3 of the types in one (integrative) portfolio
Three core elements of ePortfolios are Evidence, Assessment and Reflection. When students learn and show evidence of their growth independently or through assessments (formative and summative), reflective inquiry expands this learning documentation in ePortfolios to build students' critical thinking abilities and growth mindset. But how can this be done optimally to facilitate students' reflective-reflexive practice? The powerful tips below will give you easy implementable strategies to do so.
Give Reflections a Home: You may already be using ePortfolios as a tool for your students to document evidence of growth and achievement over time. If you have not been doing so yet, after reviewing the tips, now would be an excellent time to start!
Adding reflection tasks to the work students are already doing will promote deeper learning and critical thinking as they progress through their learning experiences. These reflections can be added to the learning artefact they relate to, and as students continue to improve in a concept or have deeper awareness and analysis of any learning or experiences, they can add more content to the reflections that are already there. Using ePortfolios to perform dual purposes of showcasing learning and reflective-reflexive practice is a tactical way to leverage the tool to its fullest extent.
Give Prompts for purpose and scaffolding: To fully harness the power of ePortfolios for reflective-reflexive practice, a best practice would be to provide students with reflection prompts to encourage meaningful reflection and focus their self-evaluation and analysis. Students can use these specially created reflection prompts, which they may respond to via multi-media forms (video, audio, text, images, photo and files) to complete their reflections. Here are tips from the Center for Advanced Teaching and Learning Through Research (2020) on how reflection prompts should be framed for optimal results.
Reflection prompts must:
- Be crafted strategically with specific personal and intellectual goals in mind
- Be grounded in an experience, an aspect of self, or an artefact
- Be framed to generate deep thought rather than recall of superficial information
- Note concepts or theories that the learner should consider (if any) when responding
- Outline the steps the learner should follow to prepare for and conduct the reflection
Give opportunities for multiple means of expression and representation: Students are unique individuals. A one size fits all ideology of how they learn and showcase their learning cannot be applied. The same applies to reflection! Use ePortfolios to give students the flexibility to document their reflections creatively in content, artefacts and in a media format that appeals to them and best represents their reflective evidence.
Therefore, the ePortfolio is a safe space where students can independently decide how and what reflective artefacts to document that represent their best work. It also gives students the option to embed URL links to external sites. Thereby integrating other spectacular digital tools such as Blog sites, Fotobabble, Prezi, Flipgrid, Padlet. Mentimeter, Microsoft and Google Tools.
Give Constructive Reflective Feedback: Once students have begun documenting their learning and reflections in their ePortfolios, motivate students and continue to guide and encourage their reflections by giving constructive feedback on their reflection artefacts.
Giving Reflective Feedback is a strategic approach to encourage ongoing reflection further, give students continued guidance on what to expand on and begin the journey of a reflective feedback conversation between you and your students.
Through 'conversation', the ePortfolio becomes a reflective discussion board which is a popular and effective way to showcase students' reflective-reflective practice.
Give opportunities to Share and Collaborate: ePortfolios can be shared electronically or downloaded and shared. When you purposely include options for students to share and collaborate in social reflective discourse with their classmates.
When students share, collaborate and communicate on their reflections, they become more aware of others' thoughts, feelings, ideas and perspectives. When students see others' points of view and are aware of the differences and similarities of their reflective thinking to others, you are arming them with cognitive and social skills they will need in the wider world.
Repeat: Reflection is like an art- to do it well, it must be done over time. Students will need multiple opportunities to be engaged in reflection and to use ePortfolios to display their reflections for seamless integration in their lives. Similarly, implementing these tips will take time to incorporate them organically in your pedagogical approach and in your daily teaching practice. Here are the Repeat reminders:
- Repeat the tips to maximise the benefits of ePortfolio use
- Repeat the tips to give your students opportunities to think critically and for visible and continuous reflection
- Repeat the tips to give your students opportunities to be confident and comfortable in using ePortfolios
- And finally, Repeat the tips to be efficient and effective in how you instruct, encourage and monitor students' use of ePortfolios for their reflective-reflexive practice.
ePortfolios give students the space to reflect explicitly. The tool supports the development of higher-level abilities such as problem-solving, critiquing, decision-making, empathising and resolving conflicts. It is a powerful tool for life-long learning and certainly is a powerful tool for life-long reflection.
The 5 POWER (and Bonus) tips will empower you in leveraging ePortfolios and will result in your students reaping momentous benefits from their reflective-reflexive practice.
References
Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning Through Research. (2020, August 20). Prompts for Meaningful Reflection. https://learning.northeastern.edu/prompts-for-meaningful-reflection/