Over winter break I worked on my portfolio just about every day. I figured that it made sense to do a lot of the work and planning when I had free time in large chunks, rather than try to work on it piece-meal throughout the next few weeks. I added my artifacts that cover my standards. I found it difficult, at first, to decide what to use. I wanted quality work that reflected what work I did, but I also wanted to find artifacts that covered more than one standards. For the most part, all of my artifacts do cover one or more standards. I think that is representative of my teaching as, I most projects that my students complete cover multiple standards over multiple disciplines.
I also went ahead in assignments and did the class reflections and linked my artifacts for them. I found it harder to reflect on those classes that we had at the beginning of the program, as we took them so long ago. For some classes, I felt as though I needed to show multiple artifacts either because the artifacts were a small representation of the class or they were really great, in-depth projects.
I need to go through and add a few more artifacts in a few more places, just to add more depth to my portfolio. I stuck between wanting to show a lot of work and knowing that it will be too time consuming for someone to read if there is too much.
This is the second portfolio that I have created in 6 years. My best suggestion to those in the higher ed world who make the decisions is this: Tell the students the gist of portfolio process, maybe giving them some sort of shell, in the beginning or near the beginning of a program. It is so difficult, and I feel less genuine, to have students reflect on work that they did 1 1/2 years ago. Just my two cents ;)
Hi Sarah, sounds like you're right on track! I haven't done the reflections of classes with artifacts yet, but seems like that will be a difficult part of this process. I like how you commented about knowing about this a lot earlier in the program. That would have helped! I know they mentioned it, but knowing we'd have to reflect on each class may have helped or have that as an assignment in the class so we could use it in the future for our portfolio. I'm going to head over to your portfolio and take a look, sounds like you've got a great one started!
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