One of the problems of asking first year students to “reflect” is that, typically, they don’t know how to reflect. It’s not a skill that a lot of students come prepared to University with, nor have developed. Yet, it’s a critical skill to have – to think about what you’ve done, and identify what worked well, what needs improvement and what can change.
Reflection is really not a simple process, but it’s crucial to learning, and really important to deep learning. Think of all the life lessons you’ve learned, and I bet you’ve thought about them often, and sometimes deeply. They change you. Similarly, good educational experiences (whether that’s reading a book, attending a lecture, practicing a lab, or just trying something out) cause you to think about them, and again, sometimes deeply. It’s that deep learning that the Learning Portfolio wants to get at.
The activities we have unveiled in the first year of the Learning Portfolio were good – but mostly course based. Anecdotally, we didn’t see a lot of extracurricular activity, or if we did, it was part of the program. One potential reason was that we didn’t give any student a reason to actually use the tool. So one way to solve that will be to post writing prompts, to offer students something to reflect on and a reason to use the tool on their own. Each writing prompt will help students connect their academic work to their “outside” life, connecting academia to reality. I consider this sort of thing “translational” – an effort to break academia down to understandable language for the average person. In the process, hopefully students will engage with thinking about what they’re doing, set a goal for themselves and maybe get a little bit more out of their experience here.