reflection about portfolio essay

Portfolio Essay

A Portfolio Essay is a unique narrative that showcases an individual’s skills, experiences, and personal growth. Our guide, enriched with a variety of essay examples , is tailored to help you construct a compelling portfolio essay. This type of essay is crucial for students and professionals alike, as it provides a platform to reflect on and present one’s journey and achievements. The examples included will guide you in highlighting your accomplishments, insights, and learning experiences, crafting an essay that truly represents your personal and professional narrative.

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Common questions to sked whenever you are tasked to write an essay are “how do I start?” and “what would this be all about?” Or let’s just say you were asked to write something that is a portfolio essay. What is a portfolio essay? How to write a portfolio essay? Portfolios, by definition, a

re the collection of the best works depending on the field you are in. You can be in the field of art, poetry or any kind of writing. This is not just about collecting. You have to exert effort to analyze it by the use of an essay. What to do next? Lets begin to tackle and make things clear.

1. Portfolio Essay

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2. Student Portfolio Essay

3. College Portfolio Essay

4. Portfolio Summative Reflection Essay

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5. Student Portfolio Essay

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6. Reflective Portfolio Essay

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7. Absolutism and Revolution Portfolio Essay

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8.Visual Art Portfolio Essay

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9. Portfolio Introduction Essay

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10. Portfolio Assessment Essay

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11. Portfolio Narrative Essay

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12. Portfolio Conclusion Essay

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13. English Portfolio Essay

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14. Sample Portfolio Essay

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What is a Portfolio Essay?

A portfolio essay is like a reflection paper that gives an analysis over a particular work of an author. You are to observe yourself with regards to how you feel and what you think with regards to your work portfolio. In simple terms, you are to reflect on your work whether you write for what is good and what is not good for them. You also have to make an observation of the progress of your writing skills whether they have developed or not including the factors that causes it and the motives.

Things to Consider When Writing a Portfolio Essay

You should be focusing on your portfolio essay alone

You don’t need to think of a special topic for your portfolio essay. Maybe your professor in school have already told you to write something about personal portfolio essays . Your essay must have a very clear focus. It may be all about your progress as its own writer or on your other writings. Make sure that you have understood everything especially those things that are being required from you.

Pick writings according to a criteria

The criteria are as follows: chronological, thematic and style. Chronological means based on sequence of events. Thematic means having your essay centered on a particular problem. Style means your writing style or a literary movement.

Find some time to introduce yourself

Every essays begin with an introduction. Present your introduction in a paragraph between five to ten sentences. Take note that portfolio essay is very different from an autobiography so you do not have to make a long list about your life. This type of essay is an advertisement to sell your work, so you better have to show all its assets.

Describe your writings

In order to present your writings, you always have to read your writings over and over again. This is because it is recommended to read them prior to your portfolio essay writing. You have to make sure that all aspects are clear especially in the title of your work, style, genre, main idea and even the methods that you used.

Come up with a conception about the writings

It is best to inform the readers about what is special in your work. You may also consider answering questions on your own such as about the development of your writing skills , factors that influenced your writing and more.

Style and Grammar

You may try to ask for a friend to read your paper to receive feedbacks if there are some necessary changes regarding it. Make sure that you work well on your grammar and the punctuations.

What is the first thing that you should do before writing your portfolio essay?

The first thing to do is to select your piece. Without knowing what the content of your portfolio, you will be having a hard time writing the essay.

What could be the process when you are writing your portfolio essay online?

Online writing portfolios should be done in any medium relating online. You may pass your documents through email instead of putting them all in a folder.

What will you do if your professor will not give you any guidelines about portfolio essay writing?

You may try to show all your work using any medium as possible.

Students, in some event in their school life, have already experienced creating portfolios of their individual achievements. In the case of a portfolio essay, you are required to read first your piece before having each of them assessed. Even though your portfolio essay doesn’t need to have a topic on its own, it is much better to work for it as clearly as you can and as precise as possible.

Portfolio Essay Generator

Text prompt

Instructive
Professional

Reflect on your academic achievements this year in your Portfolio Essay.

Discuss the development of your writing skills through various assignments in your Portfolio Essay.

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

5 Documenting Your Learning and Personal Growth: Critical Reflection

One key aspect of a portfolio is reflective expression. According to Carole Rodgers, “Reflection is a meaning-making process that moves a learner from one experience into the next with a deeper understanding of its relationship with and connections to other experiences and ideas. It is the thread that makes continuity of learning possible.” While the resume and curriculum vitae show what you have done, a reflection shows what you think about what you have done. It allows you to demonstrate thought, and process and document personal growth.

“Reflecting means being intentionally thoughtful about defining an experience, explaining that experience, and determining future implications and actions,” according to Parkes, Dredger, and Hickes. Reflection most often takes the form of writing, but it can also include video or audio reflections. Reflection should take place throughout the portfolio and it “reaches its full potential” when it becomes progressive in that each reflection builds on the others. It is woven into the about me and is an important part of the gallery of artifacts.

Guiding Principles of Reflection

Carole Rogers suggests there are several guiding principles of reflection and at the heart of these are meaning-making, systematic thinking, and personal growth.

Meaning Making: Reflection is a meaning-making process that moves a learner from one experience into the next with deeper understanding of its relationships with and connections to other experiences and ideas.
Systematic Thinking: Reflection is a systematic, rigorous, disciplined way of thinking.
Focused on Personal Growth: Reflection requires attitudes that value personal and intellectual growth.

Now that you know the role of reflection in a portfolio and that it is made up of meaning-making, systematic thinking, and personal growth, let’s look at several ways to get started with writing your reflection.

Two overlapping circles. One says, "purpose." One says, "audience." In the middle, it says "portfolio content."

The Importance of Audience and Purpose

As with all writing, you should have a clear sense of purpose and audience. For example, “I am writing these portfolio reflections to be read by future employers for the purpose of getting a job in the field of marketing” or “I am writing these portfolio reflections to be read by the admittance committee for the purpose of getting accepted into graduate school.” Finally, your purpose may be, “I am writing these reflections as a way to help me better understand my skills so I can visualize a variety of paths in my future.” It is likely that your portfolio will have multiple audiences and you should proceed keeping those audiences in mind. As Gallagher and Poklop suggest, students should consider “inviting different readers to have different experiences of the portfolio by offering them guidance in how to understand, experience, and interact with the portfolio.”

Let’s look at one model of using critical reflection referred to as the what, so what, and now what reflection, also called the Driscoll Cycle. I will explain the cycle, share with you question prompts, offer a video review of the cycle, and then an example of what the cycle looks like when applied.

Three circles that say, What, So What, and Now What

Critical Reflection Using the Three Step Model

The Driscoll Cycle of Reflection includes three very basic steps:

What? Describe what happened.
So What? Analyze the event.
Now what? Anticipate future practice based on what you learned.

Let’s break them down one at a time.

In the “what” stage, you should recall what you did and write about it as objectively as possible. Just the facts.

What happened?
What is your artifact? Name and describe it.
What context/background information is important or relevant to your audience?
What happened in a particular situation? What did you do? What were the results?
How much did you know about the subject before we started?
What process did you go through to produce this piece or complete this project/activity?
What problems did you encounter while you were working on this project/activity? How did you solve them?
What were the challenges?
What were powerful learning moments?

Let’s look at an example from a student portfolio. Kaitlyn LaMaster answered the “what” step this way.

Undertaking the task of writing a paper on the “Cellular and Molecular Mechanisms of Paralysis from Spinal Cord Injury (SCI)” was an enormous challenge that tested my critical thinking and organizational skills. My neurobiology professor had challenged us to select a topic that interested us, dive into the relevant scientific journals, analyze the findings, and produce a final product of professional quality. Despite feeling overwhelmed, I approached the task step by step, reading one journal after the other, and using my available resources to help me prepare. After numerous drafts and revisions, I submitted the paper, and it earned me an A grade, which reinforced my dedication and hard work.

In the “so what” step, you begin to look for patterns and for what it means. You are talking about moments of significance. Your goal is to write about why this encounter or assignment matters to you.

What insights did you gain from the project or assignment?
What are your feelings about this?
How does what you learned relate to your education or career aspirations?
What did you learn about yourself from this?
How does this connect to other skills, experiences, or knowledge?
What was important about the situation?
How did you apply course concepts?
What skills did you use or acquire?
How did you overcome barriers or challenges?
What part are you most proud of? Why?
What would you do differently?
How was your experience different from what you expected?
What is the most important thing you learned personally during this project/activity?
How do you feel about this project/activity?
What were your goals for this project/activity? Did your goals change as you worked on it? Did you meet your goals?
What does this project/activity reveal about you as a learner?
How does this project/activity link to previous experiences/knowledge?
In what ways did this change how you looked at this subject/topic?
What did you learn about yourself while working on this?
What moments are you most proud of your efforts/involvement?
In what ways have you improved at this kind of work?
In what ways do you think you need to improve?

Kaitlyn LaMaster answered the “so what” step this way.

This experience taught me invaluable lessons about preparation and organization, which I can apply to any other aspect of life, including sales. I not only researched my topic but also familiarized myself with the best practices for writing a paper of that size. This helped me discover useful resources and applications that aided me in keeping track of the vast amount of information I needed to read, summarize, and cite. With these skills, I could effectively manage dozens of articles, citations, photographs, and other sources, leading to the success of my paper.

In the “now what” step, you will write about what you will do next.

How will this influence the way you approach future projects or endeavors?
How have you changed or grown because of this experience?
What will change as a result of this?
What would you like to learn more about?
What are you going to do as a result?
What did this experience teach you?
How will you apply what you learned from your experience?
What would you like to learn more about, related to this project or issue?
What is the impact on others from your project?
How does this advance the understanding of the topic?
What is one thing you want people to notice when they look at your work?

Kaitlyn LaMaster answered the “now what” step this way.

Through this experience, I realized the importance of being organized and prepared, and I know this will be an asset in any career, including sales. It has taught me the value of breaking down complex tasks into manageable steps, using available resources, and being organized in managing information, all essential skills in a sales position.

As with all writing, you should have an engaging opening sentence, a clear thesis, and an interesting closing sentence. In essence, each of your reflections should follow this five-step process.

Engaging opening, thesis, what, so what, now what, thoughtful closing sentence.

Now that you know the process, let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

Examples of Using the What, So What, Now What for Study Abroad Reflections

Xavier Smith, Career Counselor at the University of Arkansas helps students write about their experiences while studying abroad. Here is his advice and an example.

How can you explain your story in your portfolio? A helpful method in describing your story is a technique called “What? So what? Now what?” “What” calls for you to explain what took place in your involvement or what you noticed. “So what?” calls for you to connect the relevance of it. What was the impact? Discuss any themes, skills, or lessons that were learned. Lastly, describe the “now what”. “Now what” calls for you to describe how you will use the new skills, experience, or insight in future endeavors.

“While studying abroad in Belize, I collaborated with 10 classmates to coordinate rural health clinics in villages in Belize. My classmates and I performed basic diagnostic tests such as the hip-waist test and blood-glucose readings.”

“Because the village was removed from the city, the locals had limited access to health assessments. I was able to connect with the locals and help work towards better overall community health. The experience allowed me to learn culturally competent communication. It was important that I meet the locals where they were to be able to connect with them. Additionally, I learned how to organize a health clinic and collaborate with local community leaders to be able to build rapport with the community.”

“The project informed me of the importance of actively listening to the people I am working with instead of trying to impose my values on them. As a career counselor, I am learning how to listen to the experiences of others and help them discover their unique path. Because of my time in Belize, I am extremely considerate of the perspectives and culture that people bring with them to any space. I intend to continue to grow in understanding through active listening to maximize the efforts of the students.”

Check out Xavier’s Portfolio to see how he uses the “what”, “who what,” “now what” in other examples.

After viewing Xavier’s portfolio, answer these questions:

Which of the “now what’s” resonated with you?
How might an employer view his experience studying abroad?
In what ways did the photos enhance the message?

Can You Identify the What, So What, Now What Parts?

Look at this post from Sydney Maples and see if you can identify the what, so what, and now what parts of this reflection.

The “Empathy” Study: A Virtual Exploration of Homelessness

“While I worked as a programmer in Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (the campus virtual reality lab), we received a grant to work on an Empathy-based study in virtual reality. I, along with another person within the lab, spent the summer creating a study that immersed participants in a virtual world in which they were homeless on the streets. This in itself required some aspect of science communication, as we both worked on separate components of the study and ultimately tied each component together — which required a lot of justification and debate over best programming practices for the study. I also worked on this study when I was still fairly new to programming, and while most of the knowledge was self-contained within the platform, working on a team to create something so important was part of what got me interested in science communication so early on. It was a wonderful blend of mediums (from video game engines to the Oculus Rift), and watching my programs being used in social psychology studies on participants – including demonstrations at nearby events – was what really made a difference to me and my ability to communicate with others about scientific topics. Not only did I communicate about the current state of homelessness, but I was also given further opportunities to discuss topics pertaining to the environment, such as ocean acidification, before placing participants into a virtual world to see for themselves. Between giving scientific information about the study to participants, to consoling participants if they got upset by what they were experiencing in the virtual world, I learned how to communicate both emotionally and practically as required in a scientific setting.” Sydney Maples

After viewing this example from Sydney, answer these questions:

Could you identify the “what,” “so what” and “now what?”
Did she give you enough information about her project that you would understand what it was and why it mattered?
Compare the format of Xavier to the format of Sydney and talk about the impact of the different approaches.

Looking for more examples to examine. Look at these portfolios and see if you can identify the “what,” “so what” and “now what?”

Laura Barnum, Biochemistry major at University of Waterloo.

Look at the Sample and Analyze

Analyze Hannah Gabrielle’s Course Reflection.

Analyze Carrie Whites Report Reflection

Look at the sample reflections and rate the following items: (did not do) 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9- 10 (excellent)

The example answered the question, “What?”
The example answered the question, “So What?” The example represented systematic thinking. ( There was evidence of thoughtfulness and connections were made).
The example represented making meaning. ( It didn’t just give an example, it gave meaning to why this example was included or why it mattered).
The example answered the question, “Now What?” The example demonstrated personal growth.
The example was engaging.
The example used college-level professional writing.
The example had an engaging opening sentence.
The example had an engaging closing sentence.
The example had a clear thesis.

Key Take Aways

Reflection should include meaning-making, systematic thinking, and personal growth.
Reflections can be written but they can also be audio or videos. They are not limited by modality.
Portfolio reflections should always be written with the author and purpose in mind.
The three-step model of writing critical reflection is what, now what, and now what.
Reflections should have an engaging opening sentence, a thesis statement, and an interesting closing sentence.

Ideas and Resources for Teachers

Have students use the prompts from “Here are phrases you might use in your reflection” and complete every prompt.
Ask students to print out their reflections and then in class have them use highlighters to color in what, so what, and now what in different colors.
Go around the room and ask students to read only the first sentence from their reflection. Have them read only the last sentence. Challenge them to rewrite them to be engaging.
Have students complete the artifact assignment and the artifact peer review.
Have students write about a signature assignment.
Have students do an in-class small-moment reflection about something that happened to them that week.

Additional Resources

Check out this Reflection Toolkit from the University of Edinburgh for ideas and resources.

For an overview of other reflection models, check out the University of Connecticut’s page on Reflection Models and the Global Digital Citizen Foundations Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Critical Thinking.

Consider the suggestions on how to have students reflect from an article on Developing Innovative Reflections from Faculty Development: Lessons Learned:

Reflection Exercises

Looking for some creative reflection prompts? Try out one of these ideas.

Letter to Your Future Self

Write a letter to your current self from your future self.

What did you learn in college that was instrumental to your growth?
What goals have you accomplished?
What thing did you learn in college that you didn’t think was that important at the time but is important to you now?
What obstacles did you overcome to get where you are?
What core belief did you cling to?
What do you want your current self to remember as it moves forward?

Write About Small Moments

The goal of a small moment reflection is to focus on something that was meaningful to you in the moment. For example, in a service learning experience, what is a small thing that you remember that taught you a big lesson? Why was this meaningful to you? When studying abroad, what was a small thing that someone did that made you think? What was a small moment where you realized something important about yourself?

Write Six Words

Choose six independent words that describe an experience. Write your reflection telling why you chose those six words and what that says about the lesson that you learned.

Write About a Signature Assignment

A signature assignment is something that illustrates something that you learned in the course. This signature assignment can be connected to the objectives of the course, the objectives of your program of study, or the objectives of the institution. For Roach and Alvey at the University of Michigan-Flint, it means

A signature assignment is a substantial project within a course that illustrates something quintessential about course content, embeds at least one general education learning outcome, asks students to synthesize and apply learning, gives students agency and choice in the application of their learning, and requires a significant and intentional reflective component to help students identify and articulate relationships between course material, the curriculum, their community, and their sense of self.

One common feature of portfolios is the inclusion of signature assignments. Typically, this involves showing what you did in the class (what), why that mattered (so what), and how you will apply that or how it impacted you in some way (now what).

Serenna Hammons writes about her coursework. In the final part of her reflection, she writes the impact of what she learned:

The most important thing I learned in this course is that I matter. My lazy decisions have a negative impact on the environment, and I have the power to make a positive influence. There are so many things I can do and so many ways to get other people involved. Just my actions alone won’t be monumental, but if everyone made small changes, we can make a big difference. Educating yourself on these things and taking on responsibility is the best way to make a difference.

Tell Your Story Digitally

Tell us the story of how you overcame an obstacle using pictures and videos.
Create a visual journey of the highlights and insights from your collage journey using pictures and videos.

Write About Your Study Abroad with the Four P’s

Career Specialist Xavier Smith writes about using the 4 P’s of reflection: What are the cool people, places, perks, and projects that you were involved in? By focusing on these areas in your experience, you can provide context to all the cool things you indulged in while abroad. Listing these items is not enough; however, you need to be descriptive of those cool items by utilizing what, so what, and now what. This formula allows you to state what happened, describe its importance to your development, and describe how your new understanding will influence how you navigate the world. Taking this thorough approach in your portfolio will demonstrate your deep thought process and provide viewers with a broader scope or perspective of your experiences and what they mean to you and the larger world.

For a quick review, watch this video published by the McLaughlin Library at the University of Guelph:

Here are phrases you might use in your reflection.

From the Reflective Practice Toolkit, University of Cambridge LibGuide on Reflective Writing and Reflective Prompts by University of Cumbria

Bleicher, R. E., & Correia, M. G. (2011). Using a “Small Moments” writing strategy to help undergraduate students reflect on their service-learning experiences. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement 15(4 ), 27-56.

Dewey, J. (1910). How We Think. D.C. Heath and Company.

https://www.schoolofeducators.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/EXPERIENCE-EDUCATION-JOHN-DEWEY.pdf

Eynon, B. & Gambino, L. (2017). High-impact ePortfolio practice. Stylus Publishing.

Gallagher, C., & Poklop, L. (2014). ePortfolios and Audience: Teaching a Critical Twenty-First Century Skill. International Journal of ePortfolio , 4 (1), 7–20. http://www.theijep.com/pdf/IJEP126.pdf

Gladd, J. Write What Matters . Open license.

Global Digital Citizen Foundation. Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Critical Thinking.

House, A. T. (2021). Reflection Paper. Student Success, University of Arkansas.

Illinois Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. Artifacts and Reflective Self-Expression.

Lengelle, R., Meijers, F., Poell, R., & Post, M. (2014). Career writing: Creative, expressive and reflective approaches to narrative identity formation in students in higher education. Journal of Vocational Behavior , 85(1), 75–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2014.05.001

Parkes, K., Dredger, K., & Hicks, D. (2013). ePortfolio as a measure of reflective practice. International Journal of ePortfolio , 3 (2), 99–115. http://www.theijep.com/pdf/IJEP110.pdf

Reynolds, N. & Davis, N. (2014). Portfolio keeping: A guide for students. Bedford St. Martin.

Reynolds, C. & Patterson, J. (2014). Leveraging the ePortfolio for integrative learning. Stylus Publishing.

Roach, S. & Alvery, J. (2021). Fostering integrative learning and reflection through “signature assignments.” American Association of Colleges and Universities

Rolfe, G., Freshwater, D., Jasper, M. (2001) Critical reflection in nursing and the helping professions: A user’s guide. Palgrave Macmillan.

Rodgers, C. (2002). Defining Reflection: Another Look at John Dewey and Reflective Thinking. Teachers College Record, 104 (4), 842–866.

Ryan, M. (2011). Improving reflective writing in higher education: A social semiotic perspective, Teaching in Higher Education, 16:1 , 99-111, https://doi.org/ https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2010.507311

Spandel, V. (1997). Reflections on Portfolios. Handbook of Academic Learning, Academic Press.

Speller, L. (2019). TIPS for Teaching with Technology: Using ePortfolios to Increase Critical Reflection in the Classroom. https://tips.uark.edu/tips-for-teaching-with-technology-using-eportfolios-to-increase-critical-reflection-in-the-classroom/

University of Cambridge LibGuide. Reflective practice toolkit.

University of Connecticut Center for Teaching and Learning. Reflections and Reflection Models and Sample Reflection Questions

University of Cumbria. Reflective Prompts

University of Edinburg. Reflection Toolkit

Utrel, M. Swinford, R, Fallowfield, S. Angermeier, L (2022). Developing innovative reflections from faculty development: Lessons learned. AAEEBL Portfolio Review.

Walters, S & Jenning, J. ePortfolio Presentation. Teaching and Faculty Support Center

The example of the Driscoll cycle was developed by a student at The Robert Gillespie Science of Learning .

Portfolios Referenced

Martin Causan

Laura Barnum

Serenna Hammons

Sydney Maples

Xavier Smith

Documenting Your Learning and Personal Growth: Critical Reflection Copyright © 2023 by Lynn Meade is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The Portfolio – Culminating Activity (Your Final)

Portfolio assignment.

EN 111 Final Portfolio

The portfolio is a selection of work that demonstrates your writing abilities and knowledge about writing and critical thinking at the close of EN 111. For the purposes of this class, this assignment will be considered the final.

What goes in the Portfolio?

Title page (title + optional picture and/or quote)
Reflective Essay (~2 pages)
A final (2nd) draft copy of all essays completed during the semester (Experience, Compare/Contrast, Issues) and the prior drafts for all essays.
Selected Artifacts (2-3)

You should title the portfolio in a way that captures your sense of yourself as a writer and critical thinker at this point in your educational journey. You can include a picture and/or quote on the title page as well. A quote can come from anywhere (any text, movie, lyrics, etc.) but should illustrate your perspective about writing and/or critical thinking. You will discuss the significance of your title (picture and quote too if you included them) in your Reflective Essay.

Reflective Essay for Portfolio

The Reflective Essay is a self-assessment that examines the entire body of your work (all of your writing up to this point) rather than a single subject and/or inquiry thread. Your task is to examine, or reflect on , your own writing and situate your observations and interpretations within the context of our discussions about writing and critical thinking skills. The portfolio, in essence, is a presentation—a somewhat persuasive demonstration illustrating how you approached writing and critical thinking before EN 111, and how you see yourself, as a writer and thinker, now, in relation to these same abilities/skills at the close of the course.

What goes in the Reflective Essay?

This essay should be a fairly polished and focused piece of writing that supports its claims and reflections with specific evidence (i.e. cite yourself). It will run ~2 pages in length. All reflective essays should take into account the following, but not necessarily in the order presented here:

The significance of your title (and picture and quote, if included).
What you now understand about effective writing and how it is achieved and what the portfolio reveals about your writing and your abilities to think on paper. (Refer to your included essays and selected artifacts).
What you now understand about writing and critical inquiry that this portfolio might not reveal. (You may understand more than your portfolio reveals).
What the portfolio reveals about you as a writer and critical thinker at this point in your educational journey (Refer to your included essays and selected artifacts).
What challenges you continue to face as writer and critical thinker. (What is hard for you? In what areas have you gotten stronger and more confident? What immediate goals have you set for yourself as you continue to develop as a writer and critical thinker?)
(Optional) Discuss, document, and evaluate the extent to which you were actively engaged in this class (i.e. determine how much time/effort you put into this course and whether your writing reflects that same time/effort).

You are to include final (2nd) draft copies (at minimum) of all the essays you have written in this course. In including your essays, you will be expected to discuss why you have included them in your Reflective Essay, and explain specifically what they illustrate about you as a writer and critical thinker. As such, I recommend that you discuss how the essays reveal your analytical skills at work—your abilities to develop, examine, and communicate an informed perspective.

Selected Artifacts

I am asking you to include 2-3 artifacts from the course (or outside of EN 111) that are significant to, and reflective of, you in terms of yourself as a writer and critical thinker. You may select anything from your Informal Writing Collection (freewrites, peer exchanges, etc.), your formal writing (part of your essay(s), or parts of them as a sequence from the first draft to the final draft stage) or other texts (a particular paper or assignment from another class you found pertinent to your overall growth).

How Do I Submit It?

You should submit the portfolio, in the dropbox on the preceding page, as a Word document or a PDF so that I may open it in Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Portfolio Assignment. Authored by : Jason Brown. Provided by : Herkimer College. Project : AtD OER Course. License : CC BY: Attribution

The Reflective Essay

The reflective essay serves two key purposes in your portfolio:

First, it gives your reviewers some insight into your development as a writer and the role writing has played in your Carleton education.
Second, it allows you to tell your readers about each individual essay in the portfolio–where and how you came to write it, why you included it, what it reveals about you as a writer, etc.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, writing the reflective essay allows you, the writer, to stop and consider what you have gained from your varied writing experiences at Carleton and how you intend to develop your skills going forward.

These three purposes mean that the reflective essay is perhaps the most important single component of your portfolio. Since it’s the only item you will write exclusively for the portfolio, it’s the only opportunity you will have to connect directly with your reviewers and draw their attention to the most important qualities of your writing. Furthermore, the reflective essay provides you an opportunity to take stock of your own writing and draw your own conclusions about its strengths and weaknesses, rather than relying on the assessments of your professors. Thus, the amount of time and effort you put into your reflective essay will often determine whether you find the portfolio process to be a valuable experience or just another hurdle on the way to graduation.

The questions below should serve as a guide for your reflective essay. You do not have to address the questions in any particular order, nor do you have to give them all equal time and attention (though you should try to address them all in some way). Furthermore, if any of the questions simply do not apply to your experience, feel free to skip them or reframe them. In the end, your reflective essay as a whole should read as just that—a single essay with a clear flow of ideas throughout, not a series of short responses to each of the questions below. The primary goal here is to provide your readers with useful context for your writing, not to answer these particular questions in this particular order.

Note: these need not be specifically writing skills, just skills that helped you as a writer . For instance, you may have found that your time management skills were a significant asset as you began to tackle college-level writing assignments.
What challenges (if any) did you face in meeting the expectations for writing in your Carleton classes? How did you meet these challenges?
How have you grown or developed as a writer over the past two years? How has the writing you’ve completed fit into your overall progress as a student, scholar, or thinker at Carleton?
How do you expect writing to fit into your academic work in the future? What aspects of your writing do you plan to develop further?

Your reflective essay should also explain how each of the essays you selected from your Carleton classes fits into the overall narrative of your development as a writer. You can address this over the course of the essay, as part of the overall narrative or argument, or you can include a series of paragraphs at the end of the essay that addresses each piece in turn. Either way, some questions you might address here are:

How does each essay demonstrate major skills you’ve acquired or improved? (These do not necessarily need to line up with the portfolio requirements — analysis, interpretation, observation, etc. — you can also just state in your own words what you feel you gained from writing each essay.)
Do one or more of them represent significant “turning points” or moments in your development as a writer?
Do one or more of them illustrate something about your individual style or approach to writing?

You should write at least a sentence or two about each essay in the portfolio, but you can certainly write more if you have more to say about a given piece. Regardless of how much you write about each essay, though, it is extremely important that you address what each piece brings to the portfolio, because this allows your readers understand what you want them to see when they review your work.

Length and Format

There is no minimum or maximum length for the reflective essay, but as a general guideline, it should be roughly 500-1200 words (~2-3 standard, double-spaced pages). Anything less than 500 words and you are unlikely to address the key ideas in enough depth to engage your readers. Anything more than 1200 words and readers are likely to begin “skimming” fairly heavily as they read.

Regardless of length, your reflective essay should be double-spaced and written in an easily readable 12-point font.

Titles are encouraged, but not required, though you should at the very least clearly label the document “Reflective Essay” at the top.

Additional Guidelines

Your reflective essay should:.

Make an overall argument about how you have developed as a writer since your first term at Carleton.
Use details from your personal experience to support your conclusions.
Address how each of your essays in some way illustrates your development.
Be roughly 500-1000 words long (roughly 2-3 double-spaced pages).
Maintain a generally academic tone. It’s okay to be light or even humorous in your essay, but you should avoid being glib or dismissive of the portfolio process.
Stay focused on your experience — i.e. it should not read as an evaluation of your individual classes or Carleton as a whole (though you’re free to express positive or negative opinions about the college that are relevant to your experience).

Your Reflective essay should NOT:

For example, you might mention that an essay came from your A&I course in order to explain how it illustrates some of the writing abilities you brought with you from high school, but also illustrates some weaknesses in your writing that you improved upon in later essays–ideally essays that are also included in the portfolio.
Simply restate basic ethos of the college (e.g. “I believe that writing is essential in a liberal arts education…”) without explaining how these ideas apply to your experience. Your goal is not to prove that you have internalized the “Carleton philosophy” of liberal arts education and the importance of writing. Rather, your readers want to see how you have experienced and grown from your time here.

Your Reflective Essay CAN:

Point out areas where your writing has improved over time. You might, for example, acknowledge that a more recent essay in your portfolio has a better argument or more refined language than an essay from several terms back.
Discuss your experiences as a writer before Carleton, particularly if you transferred to Carleton from another college or university.
Recognize particular challenges you’ve faced in developing your writing skills, such as learning English as a second language or not having significant experience with academic writing before Carleton.
Express criticisms or disappointments with your experiences at Carleton. While you should keep your audience (Carleton faculty and staff) and the context (an assessment of your academic writing skills) in mind, you do not have to be a “cheerleader” for Carleton. If you feel that there are gaps or shortcomings in the education you’ve received over the past few years that have made it more challenging for you to develop your writing skills in the way you wished to, you are welcome to say so.

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9.1: Portfolio Assignment

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EN 111 Final Portfolio

What goes in the Portfolio?

Title page (title + optional picture and/or quote)
Reflective Essay (~2 pages)
A final (2nd) draft copy of all essays completed during the semester (Experience, Compare/Contrast, Issues) and the prior drafts for all essays.
Selected Artifacts (2-3)

Reflective Essay for Portfolio

What goes in the Reflective Essay?

The significance of your title (and picture and quote, if included).
What you now understand about effective writing and how it is achieved and what the portfolio reveals about your writing and your abilities to think on paper. (Refer to your included essays and selected artifacts).
What you now understand about writing and critical inquiry that this portfolio might not reveal. (You may understand more than your portfolio reveals).
What the portfolio reveals about you as a writer and critical thinker at this point in your educational journey (Refer to your included essays and selected artifacts).
What challenges you continue to face as writer and critical thinker. (What is hard for you? In what areas have you gotten stronger and more confident? What immediate goals have you set for yourself as you continue to develop as a writer and critical thinker?)
(Optional) Discuss, document, and evaluate the extent to which you were actively engaged in this class (i.e. determine how much time/effort you put into this course and whether your writing reflects that same time/effort).

Selected Artifacts

How Do I Submit It?

You should submit the portfolio, in the dropbox on the preceding page, as a Word document or a PDF so that I may open it in Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Portfolio Assignment. Authored by : Jason Brown. Provided by : Herkimer College. Project : AtD OER Course. License : CC BY: Attribution

Reflective writing: Portfolios and learning journals, logs and diaries

What is reflection? Why do it?
What does reflection involve?
Reflective questioning
Reflective writing for academic assessment
Types of reflective assignments
Differences between discursive and reflective writing
Sources of evidence for reflective writing assignments
Linking theory to experience
Reflective essays
Portfolios and learning journals, logs and diaries
Examples of reflective writing
Video summary
Bibliography

Portfolios, learning journals, logs, and diaries

A learning journal, log or diary is often an important component of a portfolio. A portfolio is a collection of evidence or proof of the student’s learning and abilities.

‘A common ingredient – sometimes a compulsory one – of a portfolio is a learning journal. If you are going to use this, remember to start it soon enough – as soon as you know that a portfolio will be demanded of you…If you keep a “Learning Log”, “Learning Journal” or “Learning Diary”, you will in fact be reflecting on or thinking about what you are learning. You will be learning by internalising your experiences – by making them more fully your own…The portfolio at its best can help to bring together your whole learning process. It adds to – even while it helps you to reflect on – your personal growth, learning and development.’

Wilson (2007) in Study Guide: Portfolios, pages 1-2

Your learning journal should not be just a description of the topics and activities covered during a class session or placement; you should include some brief background but it should be predominantly about your thoughts, feelings and experiences. This should form the core of your journal. Try to get into the habit of reflecting on your learning in all modules of your course, as well as on the learning that takes place in your life in general. You can write anything that helps you to reflect on your learning. Here are some examples of the sorts of things you may wish to write about:

your feelings about the course and your progress
your feelings about the lecturers and the other students
changes in your motivation or attitude toward your learning
your ideas about how you learn most effectively - focus on your learning preferences
the things that challenge you; that you find difficult (and why)
the things you find easy (and why)
your ideas (or strategies) for tackling tasks such as essay writing and exams. You may like to set yourself some targets for these tasks
how different areas of your study are connected
how your study and your developing skills relate to other aspects of your life.

If you keep a journal, diary or log, make sure it is reflective. Keeping descriptive notes will not allow you to maximise learning from any experiences you have had.

If you are already engaging with a learning journal, why not take part in The Hull Employability Awards.

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5.9 Portfolio: Subject as a Reflection of Self

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Reflect on the development of composing processes.
Reflect on how those processes affect your final product.

As you develop a writing portfolio over the course of the semester, you will also reflect on your experience and writing process for each project. This section guides you in reflecting on your experience as you developed your profile.

Reflective Task

Take a few moments to jot down notes—by hand or electronically—in response to the following questions:

What have you learned about yourself in researching and drafting this profile?
What did you learn in your research that surprised you?
What challenges did you face in gathering your primary research from interviews and field observations?
What challenges did you face in gathering your secondary research from academic and other credible sources?
Do you now think differently about the trait you focused on in your profile? If so, how has your understanding changed? If your thinking about that trait has not changed, how was it reinforced in this project?
If you were to begin this project again, how would you approach it differently?
With whom would you like to share your finished project? Why?
What other audiences might be interested in this piece?

After reflecting on your writing process and experience, organize your thoughts thematically. For example, if some parts of the process were more challenging for you and other parts were less so, you could organize your reflection around those two ideas. Or you could separate your reflection into sections according to the parts of the writing process that were familiar and the parts that were new to you in this project.

Once you have organized your notes into sections focusing on coherent themes, draft a professional email to your instructor to report the insights you have gained from your reflection. Find out from your instructor whether you should actually send the reflection via email or if you should attach it to your final profile document instead.

E-Portfolio

-Aaron Hernandez-

E-Portfolio Reflection Essay

Aaron Hernandez

February 26, 2021

English 110C

Professor Beth Backes

Reflection Essay

I signed up for English 110C the second semester of my sophomore year at ODU. I started the year feeling good about my writing skills but not completely satisfied. The prior semester I had taken a cybersecurity course that required weekly writing assignments. This was my first taste of writing at the college level. My writing skills have never been that strong but throughout this course, I have been tasked with many assignments which have helped build my skills. Throughout this paper, I will write about my strengths and weaknesses when writing prior assignments which include IMRAD, Rhetorical Analysis, Infographic, and My midterm essay.

My first assignment in this course was an IMRAD paper about taboo words. Before this course, I had never heard of a taboo word. This made this assignment more interesting because along the process of writing my paper I learned something new. At first, I was completely lost but with the help of Professor Backes, I was able to break it down and fully understand the assignment. I started with my opening paragraph which I rewrote multiple times and finally found something I liked. Throughout this paper, I struggled with smoothly transitioning paragraphs and continued to rewrite the beginning of every paragraph. An important part of this paper was going out and getting people to fill out surveys about my taboo word. This pushed me to meet new people and find new friends which I enjoyed. I enjoyed this assignment and I felt that the body of my paper was the strongest along with my conclusion. This is because I enjoy papers that involve research. After all, I love expanding my knowledge and learning something new. After getting over a few bumps I was able to complete my paper and felt satisfied with what I turned in.

Next on the list was a rhetorical analysis essay. Compared to the IMRAD paper I felt 100 times better off the start. I loved the idea of breaking down a piece of literature and dissecting it down to its foundations. I felt strong starting with my thesis, unlike my first paper. Honestly writing this paper was straightforward because of how professor Backes had broken it down. I used a lot of my time while writing this paper just making notes about the article and creating my outline. Then when it came to writing the paper itself I simply used the information from my outline and transferred it over. I honestly rarely create an outline but when this class came around I made it a regular thing. It helps me break down the assignment and not feel so overwhelmed when it comes time to write the paper. After I finished writing this paper I felt like I had written one of my best papers ever. I was very interested in the topic and that drove me to write and finish this paper quicker and better than any others.

The next major assignment was my mid-term paper. Going into this I honestly didn’t know what to expect and was a little scared. The assignment was released and it stated we were to write a paper on problems and solutions. Already I felt comfortable because I was writing about something I knew and something personal. I ended up writing about my ADHD and the ways I overcome and deal with it. I loved writing about this because throughout my life I have met amazing people who have shared their tips with me. Using what I knew I created an outline for this paper going over the basics like the thesis and what each paragraph will be about. This helped me not feel so overwhelmed. At first, I wrote the entire paper and fell short when it came to my word count. I honestly struggled throughout this whole paper with word count because I wasn’t developing my ideas enough. So when I went back through and revised my paper I did just that and expanded on my ideas and thought. I loved the body of this paper and I believe that was the strongest part. Overall I enjoyed this assignment which is rare for me because I never really enjoyed English throughout high school. But when it came to this class I was always excited for our next assignment.

My final assignment for this class was to create an infographic. While just like the other assignments I was excited to do. I hadn’t ever created an infographic but I used to create posters back in high school and I loved doing it but hadn’t done it in a while. Going deeper into this assignment we were given a choice to pick one of our pieces to create this infographic from. I ended up choosing my problem/solution essay because I believed that it would seamlessly go together. I created my infographic essay around ways people with Adhd can overcome and tips and tricks of helping deal with it. This was my favorite assignment throughout the whole year because I’m a cybersecurity major and anything on the computer I enjoy. I started this assignment from a template and went from there. I created my 6 points which came from my six tips and tricks from my problem solution essay. The only struggle I had with this assignment was cutting down the wording for my infographic. But with tips and tricks from many sources such as professor Backes and google I was able to create something I loved.

Overall I enjoyed this class and believe that Professor Backes does an amazing job at describing the assignment and giving feedback. I only had four major assignments for this class which include IMRAD, Rhetorical analysis, midterm paper, and my infographic. I believe that I started with weak transitions and struggled with wording. But through the year with the help of this class, I was able to become a better writer overall. I believe that my transitions have become better and I was able to create pieces that I am happy with throughout the year. I’m excited to continue my writing journey and hope to get better! I believe that this class can help you refine your writing skills and build on what you already have.

ENG 101: Choose Your Own Adventure

Final Portfolio and Reflection

As an individual whose English is not her first language, English has never been easy for me, especially in writing. As I was reading the course description after enrolling in English 101: “ Choose Your Own Adventure ” I came across the word “Rhetorical.” I attempted to pronounce it, but unfortunately, I could not. My friend who was sitting next to me laughed really hard, then said, “Why are you enrolling in this class if you can’t even pronounce the most significant word in the class.” I quickly replied, “I just want to fulfil the GER Requirements.” Even now, I still can not perfectly pronounce the word. However, the pronunciation of the word is nothing other than just syllables and vowels coming out of the mouth. What is more powerful and meaningful is the meaning that it holds, which I came realize through multiple class assignments. Additionally, this class was more than “just to fulfil the GER Requirement.” I have impressively and surprisingly improved my writing skills more than I expected. Now, I can proudly admit that the course outcomes were achieved, which highly contributed to my writing skills. The outcomes for English 101 were as follow: Outcome 1, Rhetorical Composition. Students compose texts in multiple genres, using multiple modes with attention to rhetorical situations. Outcome 2: Critical Thinking and Reading Resulting in Writing. As they undertake scholarly inquiry and produce their own arguments, students summarize, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate the ideas of others. Outcome 3: Writing as Process. Students understand and practice writing as a process, recursively implementing strategies of research, drafting, revision, editing, and reflection.

Throughout the semester each assignment was designed to meet one or more of these outcomes. I improved skills in organizing and developing my writings while being aware of the audience. I learned how to express my freedom of writing. And most importantly, this portfolio does not only include my best works, but also my mistakes. And through these mistakes is where I learned the growth in my writing, and understood that writing is a process.

At the beginning of this semester, I spent more time complaining than working, even with a 150-word assignment. I perceived myself as a poor writer. However, as days went by, the continuous complaints and the feeling of being a poor writer vanished. After learning ways to develop ideas and organizing them before I start writing, which helped me to save time, and made my works understandably and excellently written. Before I would just write start writing without thinking about audiences or the purpose.

Outcome 1 for this course was Rhetorical Composition. This was achieved through several projects including Hacker-Name Bio-mythography, Place Analysis, and the Storium Project. The pattern that this class followed was very effective. I used what I learned from previous assignment to carry on to the next one.

For instance, the Hacker Name Bio-Mythography seemed quite easy and irrelevant to the course until I started working on it and realized how important it was for me as a writer and as a person. Creating my hacker name was very interesting because it made me think about the fact that there are always audience, and as crazy as it might sound, I sometimes would forget that they will be any audience. The idea of being aware of the audience turned the “quite easy” assignment to difficult assignment. In this assignment, we were asked to create a hacker name that will make us express our opinions freely. I started asking myself “Who am I?” “Who reads what I write?” and “how can I satisfy their needs?” After thinking of these questions, I created my hacker name to be I_AM_ME. After I developed this person, and became aware of the audience. It became easier for me to write. Thus, I learned that developing ideas before I start writing helps me a lot. Moving on to the next assignment of Place Analysis, I wrote about my first time at six flags. In this assignment, I described the place, my emotions, and people that were there.

With development and audience awareness skills gained from the Hacker Name assignment, and the descriptions of emotions and setting developed from the Place Analysis. I was able to write the Storium Scenes. However, at first this was not easy because I had to create characters, describe their feelings, and maintain their characters throughout while describing their new developed personalities. But, I did this by collaborating with my team.

The second outcome for this course was: Critical Thinking and Reading Resulting in Writing. This was achieved through various assignments, but most influentially through Style Guide Four.

I always tell my friends that “English is confusing.” Because there are so many English language rules that makes no sense, things like the proper pronunciation of “Arkansas” and “Kansas.” Finally, in Style Guide 4, I was given the opportunity to respectfully disagree with one of the most commonly known grammar rule of capitalization. I have never felt free of sharing my thoughts until this assignment. In this style guide, I developed the freedom and confidence in my writing. I always thought that every English grammar rule should be respected and everyone should follow them. Here, I felt the confidence and freedom in me while criticizing other people’s work and my works. I learned that freedom and confidence are essentials to effectively deliver your message.

Since the beginning of the semester until very recently, the most feedbacks I received from the professor and others were suggesting that I improve my thesis statement and organizing the paper accordingly. These feedbacks were very useful, and indeed contributed to my writing process. From thesis statements like , “ The main argument found in this article is that due to multiple reasons encountered by teenagers such as drug abuses, poverty, suicide, sexual abuses, juvenile delinquency, antisocial acts and alike. Adolescents are negatively affected by these ongoing issues, which limits the use of their capabilities to maximum.”( Annotated Bibliography ), to “The passage was well displayed through the use of pathos and imagery that insisted in illustrating character development.” ( Style Guide, 1 ) to “In this essay, I will be illustrating the use of hyperbole in creating image and ideas, as well as evoking emotions.”( Style Guide, 3)

I can confidently admit the growth in organizing and developing my paper according to my thesis statement. In the first thesis, I broke one idea into two sentences. In the second thesis, I did not fully follow this statement throughout my essay. In the third statement, I organized my essay by following my thesis.

Although, I thought that the third thesis statement was perfect. I still received feedback from my professor that the phrase “In this essay..” is more applicable with longer papers. I still witnessed improvements from the first to the third statement. Most importantly, I never stop learning ways to improve my writing skills, because according to the third outcome, “ Writing as Process: Students understand and practice writing as a process, recursively implementing strategies of research, drafting, revision, editing, and reflection.”

I look forward to continue the writing process while I apply every knowledge I have gained from this class to succeed, not only in written and orally communications, but also how I show myself in public with the audience awareness skill learned. As many successful people like to say, ”Started from the bottom, now we here.” Now, this statement applies at me as well.

How to Write 1st Class Reflective Portfolio

Increasingly, students in the UK are being encouraged to demonstrate reflective practice as part of continuing professional development. Reflective Portfolios are becoming a common part of assessments, especially in practical subjects like Education, Medicine, Business, and the Arts. Students are often confused about the requirements and expectations for Reflective Portfolios, but this summary will help you understand what’s involved.

What Is a Reflective Portfolio?

A Reflective Portfolio is a set of writings that summarise the insights and experiences a student has gained from practical assignments. It is used to assess the student’s engagement with their fieldwork, and their ability to use theoretical knowledge in an applied setting. The portfolio itself can take many forms, including an extended written piece, a notebook or binder of short writings and documentary evidence, or an online archive of such pieces.

How Is a Reflective Portfolio Different from Other Types of Academic Assignment?

The reflective portfolio is very different from traditional assignments because it allows students to explore their own learning process. Whereas traditional academic projects expect students to be objective and impersonal, a Reflective Portfolio asks students to highlight their own personal perspectives, opinions and feelings. It provides an honest summary of the work undertaken and the skill sets that were developed. The key to success is demonstrating genuine engagement with the course of study rather than a simple ability to score highly on an exam or essay.

What Does a Reflective Portfolio Normally Contain?

The contents of a Reflective Portfolio will vary according to the discipline, but in general it contains short written pieces that summarise and reflect on the experiences of practical work placements. It can include the following:

Samples of your Work – This will vary according to your field of study. For example, Art students might be asked to provide photographs or scans of some of their work, while trainee Teachers might be required to include sample lesson plans. The important thing is to include samples that reflect your best practice, and that demonstrate depth and diversity as a practitioner.
Journal Entries – Students are often asked to keep an informal journal during their practical work. This should contain a brief summary of the tasks you’ve completed, as well as critical reflection on the skills they helped you to develop. You should also make note of any situations that you found difficult or challenging, and any moments of professional insight.
Critical Incidents Reports – These are typically short summaries of moments that significantly enhanced student learning. Critical Incidents can be either positive or negative experiences which provided strong opportunities for professional development. When writing about such incidents, students should reflect on the ways that they prompted new skill development, or provided an enhanced understanding of course material.
Evidence of Achievement – This part of a Reflective Portfolio provides written evidence of student achievement. For example, students can show how they met course objectives through work placement time sheets, mentor/employer feedback, client ratings, and more. This section can also be referred to in your other portfolio writings to support your reflective statements.
Personal Statement – The Personal Statement provides an opportunity for students to summarise their newly developed skills and professional philosophies. Based on the experiences you’ve gained, how would you describe yourself professionally? Has your practical learning led you to embrace a particular philosophy related to your profession, or subscribe to a certain body of methods? In other words, what kind of practitioner will you be, and how has this been shaped by your practical fieldwork?

What Use Are Reflective Portfolios to Students?

Many students feel that Reflective Portfolios are far more helpful to their academic development than traditional assignments. This is because it allows them to develop a critical awareness of their own skill development, which helps them identify their own strengths and weaknesses. The Reflective Portfolio also instils confidence in the student as they learn to apply their theoretical knowledge to practical situations. Through a Portfolio, students reflect back on the thoughts, feelings and insights that they developed over the course of their degree programme, and this creates a more holistic educational experience than many other types of assignment.

How to Write a Good Reflective Portfolio

Be critical . Although the content of a portfolio will be more personalised than other assignments, you should use the same level of critical analysis as you do for any essay or exam.

Be comprehensive . Make sure that you include a good range of experiences that exemplify your work throughout the duration of your practical assignment. You might choose to highlight one or two periods of your work, but these should be contextualised within your overall experience.

Don’t be afraid to reveal your weaknesses . Writing about your professional insecurities and weaknesses shows examiners how much you’ve developed throughout your course. It also enables you to reflect on theories and methods that might benefit you in future.

Devise a plan for development . Your Reflective Portfolio should testify to your development as a practitioner throughout the duration of your course. However, to write a really strong portfolio you should also demonstrate an action plan for future development. Think about what knowledge and skills might address the professional weaknesses that your reflections reveal, and indicate how you intend to develop these.

Mistakes to Avoid in Writing Reflective Portfolios

The most common mistake in Reflective Writing is to be either too objective and scholarly, or too emotional and non-critical. Either mistake is equally wrong. Students should aim for a middle ground in their writing, in which they highlight their own personal feelings and reflections but analyse these with reference to the theoretical course material.

Another common mistake is not providing enough relevant evidence to support your reflections. Be sure to include documents from your practical experience, including summaries of assignments, mentor/employer feedback, client ratings and so forth.

Finally, be sure to keep your portfolio well organised and professional-looking. It is true that Reflective Portfolios entail a less formal style of writing, but students sometimes believe that this allows for disorganised presentations with jumbled notes, illegible handwriting and poor grammar. Remember that this is still an academic assignment, and all the normal standards of achievement apply!

24 Reflection and Portfolio

The final assignment in your English course will include a reflective essay in which you describe your growth as a writer over the course of the semester. This activity of reflecting on your growth and performance is what is called a metacognitive activity: one in which you think and write about your learning.

Writing a formal reflective essay may be a new thing for you, so this chapter will provide an overview of why we write reflections on our learning and how to approach a reflection assignment.

Black and white photograph of a woman leaning against a marble wall. Her reflection is mirrored clearly in the wall.

Student reflection about their thinking is such a crucial part of the learning process. You have come to this course with your own writing goals. Now is a good time to think back on your writing practices with reflective writing, also called metacognitive writing. Reflective writing helps you think through and develop your intentions as a writer. Leveraging reflective writing also creates learning habits that extend to any discipline of learning. It’s a set of procedures that helps you step back from the work you have done and ask a series of questions: Is this really what I wanted to do? Is this really what I wanted to say? Is this the best way to communicate my intentions? Reflective writing helps you authenticate your intentions and start identifying places where you either hit the target or miss the mark. You may find, also, that when you communicate your struggles, you can ask others for help! Reflective writing helps you trace and articulate the patterns you have developed, and it fosters independence from relying too heavily on an instructor to tell you what you are doing.

Reflective Learning

Reflective thinking is a powerful learning tool. As we have seen throughout this course, proficient readers are reflective readers, constantly stepping back from the learning process to think about their reading. They understand that just as they need to activate prior knowledge at the beginning of a learning task and monitor their progress as they learn, they also need to make time during learning as well as at the end of learning to think about their learning process, to recognize what they have accomplished, how they have accomplished it, and set goals for future learning. This process of “thinking about thinking” is called metacognition. When we think about our thinking—articulating what we now know and how we came to know it—we close the loop in the learning process.

How do we engage in a reflection? Educator Peter Pappas modified Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning to focus on reflection:

A Single Column Table Labeled "A Taxonomy on Reflection." From the bottom up, the cells read "Remembering: What did I do?", "Understanding: What was important about it?", '"Applying: Where could I use this again?", "Evaluating: How well did I do?", and "Creating: What should I do next?" An arrow points from the bottom cell up the list to the top cell.

This “taxonomy of reflection” provides a structure for metacognition. Educator Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano has modified Pappas’s taxonomy into a pyramid and expanded upon his reflection questions:

Drawing of a blue pyramid. On each level of the pyramid, from bottom to top, are the labels "What did I do?", "What was important about what I did? Did I meet my goals?", "When did I do this before? Where could I use this again?", "Do I see any patterns or relationships in what I did?", "How well did I do? What worked? What do I need to improve on?", and "What should I do next? What's my plan/design?"

By making reflection a key component of our work, students realize that learning is not always about facts and details. Rather, learning is about discovery.

How is reflective writing in the academic setting different from journaling or writing in a diary?

If you write in a diary or a journal, recording your thoughts and feelings about what has happened in your life, you are certainly engaging in the act of reflection. Many of us have some experience with this type of writing. In our diaries, journals, or other informal spaces for speaking – or writing- our mind, write to ourselves, for ourselves, in a space that will largely remain private.

Your reflection essay for college courses will contain some of those same features:

The subject of the reflective essay is you and your experiences
You can generally use the first person in a reflective essay

But writing academic reflections, like the one that is due for the English 100/101 portfolio assignment, is a bit different from journaling or keeping a diary:

What can be gained from metacognitive activities that ask you to reflect on your learning and your performance as a writer?

One of the major goals in any First-Year Writing class is to encourage students’ growth as writers. No one is expected to be a perfect writer at the end of the semester. Your instructor’s hope, however, is that after 16 weeks of reading, writing, and revising several major essays, you are more confident, capable, and aware of yourself as a writer than you were at the beginning of the semester. Reflecting on the process that you go through as you write – even if your writing is not perfect – can help you to identify the behaviors, strategies, and resources that have helped you to be successful or that could support your future success. In short, reflecting on how you write (or how you have written during a particular semester) can be quite powerful in helping you to identify areas where you have grown and areas where you still have room for more growth.

How can I write a reflective essay?

As with any essay, a reflective essay should come with its own assignment sheet. On that assignment sheet, you should be able to identify what the purpose of the reflective essay is and what the scope of the reflection needs to be. Some key elements of the reflective essay that the assignment sheet should answer are:

What, exactly, the scope of the reflection is. Are you reflecting on one lesson, one assignment, or the whole semester?
Do you have detailed guidelines, resources, or reference documents for your reflections that must be met?
Is there a particular structure for the reflection?
Should the reflection include any outside resources?

If you are struggling to find the answers to these questions, ask your professor!

Another wonderful resource for writing a reflective essay comes from Writing Commons , in the article “Writing an Academic Reflection Essay” . This article offers great information about the following:

What it means to be “academic” or “critical” and at the same time personal and reflective
How you can achieve focus in a reflective essay
What “evidence” is in a reflective essay

PRIOR LEARNING

Fast and well-traveled roads may make for a quicker trip, but they also miss the nuance and beauty of the scenic route. For some, the long way around is just worth it. The adventures, mishaps, connections, and coincidences that happen along the way are a teacher like no other.

If this sounds familiar to you when you think about your journey in education, then this textbook is for you. Let’s take another look at those years of experiential learning along the scenic route: your work, travel, volunteering, community involvement, entrepreneurship, and whatever else you’ve explored while not in the traditional classroom setting.

Let’s reconsider that experience as Prior Learning, and dig in to see what you’ve learned on the way.

The portfolio is composed of an assortment of documents and artifacts demonstrating previous college-level learning.

Examines your personal motivations and educational goals in the context of learning and how you will achieve them.
This portion should address each course objective found on the course syllabus, and demonstrate that you have mastered the objectives. Showcase how your learning applies to the objectives for a specific course.
You will need to supply documentation to support the narrative.
Documentation is as individual as the learner, and it may include items such as sample work products, training certificates, workplace evaluations, letters of recommendation, and/or photographs.

The Educational Narrative is asking for a very specific thing from you so that your reviewers can understand the learning you’ve done and relate it to the course you’re challenging.

What is that thing it’s asking for?

A story . Several stories, actually.

The word Narrative means “story,” of course, so this component is asking you to tell the story of your learning. To tell that story, you’ll need to have several examples that clearly demonstrate your expertise with the course’s subject matter. And these examples need to be specific . Here’s why:

In creative writing, teachers often say that the universe is in the specific. The more detailed the description, the better the reader can visualize the characters and scene. Take, for example, this line:

We got dressed up and went to the concert.

Who are they? What’d they wear? How old were they? What kind of concert was it? Who was playing? None of that is apparent, so every reader sees something different.

But what if that line was written like:

We teased our hair to the ceilings, doused it in White Rain, snapped on spandex and pleather. We tore out of the suburbs, left a mile-long streak of rubber on our way to go see Twisted Sister at CBGB’s.

Now can you see it? From the first description, it could’ve also easily been a black-tie evening at the Philharmonic, or a 7th Grade Band Concert, or… It’s the specifics that make the example come alive.

That’s your task in the Educational Narrative.

Though, of course, you’ll be writing about your class experiences and not an 80s hair band (unless you are drawing connections from when you were a member of an 80s hair band…).

ATTRIBUTIONS

Content Adapted from Excelsior Online Writing Lab (OWL). (2020). Excelsior College. Retrieved from https://owl.excelsior.edu/ licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-4.0 International License .
Content Adapted from Composition II. Authored by: Alexis McMillan-Clifton. Provided by: Tacoma Community College. Located at: http://www.tacomacc.edu .
Reflection. Authored by : Daryl Smith O’Hare. Provided by : Chadron State College. Project : Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative. License : CC BY: Attribution
Image of woman against wall. Authored by : VisualAge. Located at : https://flic.kr/p/CScnK . License : CC BY-NC-ND: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
Content Adapted from Composition II. Authored by : Elisabeth Ellington, Ph.D.. Provided by : Chadron State College. Located at : http://www.csc.edu/ . Project : Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative. License : CC BY: Attribution
Image of Taxonomy. Authored by : Peter Pappas. Located at : http://www.peterpappas.com/images/2011/08/taxonomy-of-reflection.png . Project : Copy/Paste. License : CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial
Content Adapted from A Guide to Rhetoric, Genre, and Success in First-Year Writing by Emilie Zickel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License ,
Image of pyramid. Authored by : Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano. Located at : http://langwitches.org/blog/2011/06/20/reflectu00adreflectingu00adreflection/ . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
Content Adapted from Prior Learning Portfolio Development by Baker Lawley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

ENG101 for Health Sciences Copyright © by Lori Walk; Christine Jones; and Aaron Fried is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Sean Porter - System Earth - Spring 2007

Over the past year I have been challenged and intrigued over and over by the content of this course. Both in the discussions of the material presented by the instructor, and by the research and presentations performed by the students. It has been a very enlightening, enthralling experience, that far surpasses my freshman year experience at Oregon State a few years ago. I think that this program, or at least the System Earth course, is a great introduction to the rigors of college academic life, and is well worth the effort required to be successful in it. I have learned many new skills and improved on skills I already possessed, as well as growing and changing as a person.

I have improved my research skills, my ability to critically evaluate the authors of a paper or study, my time management skills (to some extent), and certainly broadened my view of others opinions. I have encountered issues which forced me to listen to people's views even though I disagreed with them, and accepted that there would not always be consensus in all things. I have improved my writing skills to some extent, and hope to continue that trend.

I don't think I improved my time management skills enough, because I still don't set my own goals and benchmarks for getting my assignments completed on time to my own standards of quality. I would definitely like to improve my ability to take constructive criticism and use it properly to improve my essays and papers. I think I also have to improve on my ability to truly respectfully listen to other people's opinions without reacting to them, especially in a manner that could be offensive to the speaker. I hope to improve my research skills as well, since I feel I did not succeed in truly using them this year. I also don't truly feel that I have improved my public speaking skills in any large measure.

To improve in these areas I think I need to make it a point to start things earlier, set goals for myself independent of the due dates of assignments so that I have time to get peer reviews and other critiques, as well as ample time to revise and rethink my positions and statements so as to more effectively communicate my message. I need to practice listening to people I disagree with so that I can maintain my composure in the face of ideas I strongly disagree with. Losing that composure destroys my credibility when I attempt to rebut people's arguments, and it is likely to lessen their inclination to listen to my position on the matter at hand. Composure in front of a crowd is probably the skill that I would like to improve the most, next to time management. The only way to improve my presentation skills is to practice them, so I will attempt in the future to jump at every opportunity to present something.

This course has not really helped me bridge the transition from high school to college, because I have been out of high school for a number of years now. Despite that, I feel it has been valuable in helping me transition from working full time to being a full time student again because it has challenged me to think carefully and manage my time more carefully than all of my other classes. I have written more in the last year in this program than I probably wrote throughout my high school career, which has helped immensely, especially when I get useful cogent feedback about how I can improve my writing.

I have been shown how effectively good time management can increase my productivity, when I've used it, and if I can increase the percentage of the time that I apply my good time management skills, I will be better able to handle the rigors of a full college workload. I certainly have been challenged to improve my skills at working with a group of people, which I still find difficult a lot of the time, because I tend to be very lackadaisical when I am not with my group, but I think I am improving ever so slightly in that respect, I just need to continue practicing those skills. I hope that if I improve my time management skills, they will help me to be a better group member as well. I feel more comfortable speaking in public now, though I still have a certain amount of trepidation about it, especially if I don't feel that I've properly prepared myself.

I doubt I could be more comfortable with technology than I was when I began this class, I am an electronic/electrical engineering major, after all. I have definitely benefited from our in-class discussions, they have encouraged me to think carefully about our assigned readings and take into account all aspects of the issue, including contrary viewpoints. These discussions have also encouraged me to consider the impact that other people's unique set of experiences have on their viewpoints and to acknowledge them as valid even when I disagree.

Overall, I think that this year has been a great journey, I have learned a lot, including the fact that I still have a lot to learn, and I hope to continue improving my skills as a student so that I can be successful at Portland State and my career thereafter.

ENG 1101 EngComp SP2024 D885

A City Tech OpenLab Course Site

Mentor Text Analysis–Ilham Lawani

The poem “Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou hooks the audience by presenting a vivid contrast between the experiences of a caged bird and a free bird, immediately drawing the reader’s attention to the theme of freedom and confinement. Angelou describes the trapped bird’s struggle using vivid imagery and sensory words, such as “bars of rage” and “shadow of the night.” The poem is easy to follow because it switches between the caged bird and the free bird. This helps the poem end strongly. The main audience is people who understand what it’s like to want to be free. The poem talks about things that everyone can relate to, like wanting to be free from something holding them back. The poem ends by showing how strong the caged bird is, giving readers hope. In my project, I want to use vivid pictures and comparisons to make people feel things and understand deeper ideas. I’ll make sure to stick to the main idea and not make things too complicated, so everyone can understand and feel connected to it.

Using Maya Angelou’s “Caged Bird” as a mentor text, we can see how our obsession with horror and the bird’s fight for escape are similar. Like a trapped bird longing to escape, horror gives us a controlled opportunity to face our fears and emotions. This all shows how, up until we discover a method to express and let go of them, our emotions might feel imprisoned, much like a bird in a cage.

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10 April 2024

Is ChatGPT corrupting peer review? Telltale words hint at AI use

Dalmeet Singh Chawla

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

You have full access to this article via your institution.

A close up view of ChatGPT displayed on a laptop screen while two hands are poised to type.

A study suggests that researchers are using chatbots to assist with peer review. Credit: Rmedia7/Shutterstock

A study that identified buzzword adjectives that could be hallmarks of AI-written text in peer-review reports suggests that researchers are turning to ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools to evaluate others’ work.

The authors of the study 1 , posted on the arXiv preprint server on 11 March, examined the extent to which AI chatbots could have modified the peer reviews of conference proceedings submitted to four major computer-science meetings since the release of ChatGPT.

Their analysis suggests that up to 17% of the peer-review reports have been substantially modified by chatbots — although it’s unclear whether researchers used the tools to construct reviews from scratch or just to edit and improve written drafts.

How ChatGPT and other AI tools could disrupt scientific publishing

The idea of chatbots writing referee reports for unpublished work is “very shocking” given that the tools often generate misleading or fabricated information, says Debora Weber-Wulff, a computer scientist at the HTW Berlin–University of Applied Sciences in Germany. “It’s the expectation that a human researcher looks at it,” she adds. “AI systems ‘hallucinate’, and we can’t know when they’re hallucinating and when they’re not.”

The meetings included in the study are the Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations, due to be held in Vienna next month, 2023’s Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, held in New Orleans, Louisiana, the 2023 Conference on Robot Learning in Atlanta, Georgia, and the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing in Singapore.

Nature reached out to the organizers of all four conferences for comment, but none responded.

Buzzword search

Since its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has been used to write a number of scientific papers , in some cases even being listed as an author . Out of more than 1,600 scientists who responded to a 2023 Nature survey , nearly 30% said they had used generative AI to write papers and around 15% said they had used it for their own literature reviews and to write grant applications.

In the arXiv study, a team led by Weixin Liang, a computer scientist at Stanford University in California, developed a technique to search for AI-written text by identifying adjectives that are used more often by AI than by humans.

By comparing the use of adjectives in a total of more than 146,000 peer reviews submitted to the same conferences before and after the release of ChatGPT, the analysis found that the frequency of certain positive adjectives, such as ‘commendable’, ‘innovative’, ‘meticulous’, ‘intricate’, ‘notable’ and ‘versatile’, had increased significantly since the chatbot’s use became mainstream. The study flagged the 100 most disproportionately used adjectives.

Scientific sleuths spot dishonest ChatGPT use in papers

Reviews that gave a lower rating to conference proceedings or were submitted close to the deadline, and those whose authors were least likely to respond to rebuttals from authors, were most likely to contain these adjectives, and therefore most likely to have been written by chatbots at least to some extent, the study found.

“It seems like when people have a lack of time, they tend to use ChatGPT,” says Liang.

The study also examined more than 25,000 peer reviews associated with around 10,000 manuscripts that had been accepted for publication across 15 Nature Portfolio journals between 2019 and 2023, but didn’t find a spike in usage of the same adjectives since the release of ChatGPT.

A spokesperson for Springer Nature said the publisher asks peer reviewers not to upload manuscripts into generative AI tools , noting that these still have “considerable limitations” and that reviews might include sensitive or proprietary information. ( Nature’s news team is independent of its publisher.)

Springer Nature is exploring the idea of providing peer reviewers with safe AI tools to guide their evaluation, the spokesperson said.

Transparency issue

The increased prevalence of the buzzwords Liang’s study identified in post-ChatGPT reviews is “really striking”, says Andrew Gray, a bibliometrics support officer at University College London. The work inspired him to analyse the extent to which some of the same adjectives, as well as a selection of adverbs, crop up in peer-reviewed studies published between 2015 and 2023. His findings, described in an arXiv preprint published on 25 March, show a significant increase in the use of certain terms, including ‘commendable’, ‘meticulous’ and ‘intricate’, since ChatGPT surfaced 2 . The study estimates that the authors of at least 60,000 papers published in 2023 — just over 1% of all scholarly studies published that year — used chatbots to some extent.

Gray says it’s possible peer reviewers are using chatbots only for copyediting or translation, but that a lack of transparency from authors makes it difficult to tell. “We have the signs that these things are being used,” he says, “but we don’t really understand how they’re being used.”

‘Obviously ChatGPT’ — how reviewers accused me of scientific fraud

“We do not wish to pass a value judgement or claim that the use of AI tools for reviewing papers is necessarily bad or good,” Liang says. “But we do think that for transparency and accountability, it’s important to estimate how much of that final text might be generated or modified by AI.”

Weber-Wulff doesn’t think tools such as ChatGPT should be used to any extent during peer review, and worries that the use of chatbots might be even higher in cases in which referee reports are not published. (The reviews of papers published by Nature Portfolio journals used in Liang’s study were available online as part of a transparent peer-review scheme .) “Peer review has been corrupted by AI systems,” she says.

Using chatbots for peer review could also have copyright implications, Weber-Wulff adds, because it could involve giving the tools access to confidential, unpublished material. She notes that the approach of using telltale adjectives to detect potential AI activity might work well in English, but could be less effective for other languages.

Nature 628 , 483-484 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01051-2

Liang, W. et al. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07183 (2024).

Gray, A. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16887 (2024).

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St. Augustine man sets himself on fire outside New York courthouse seating Trump jury

Police crime tape is strung at the site across from Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City after a man reportedly set himself on fire during the trial of former President Donald Trump, in New York City on April 19, 2024. A man set himself on fire Friday outside the court, New York police said, with officers rushing to extinguish the flames. TV reporters described the scene that unfolded moments after the full panel of 12 jurors and six alternates was selected for the trial of the former president in a hush money cover-up case.

A man from St. Augustine set himself on fire Friday afternoon outside the New York City courthouse where jurors in the criminal trial of former President Donald Trump were being chosen.

Officials with the New York City Police Department identified the man as Max Azzarello , 37, of St. Augustine at a 3 p.m. news conference.

According to USA TODAY , Azzarello doused himself with an accelerant and set himself on fire around 1:35 p.m. across the street from the courthouse, in Collect Pond Park.

Officials said Azzarello was in critical condition at a nearby hospital.

USA TODAY reported the incident took place in full view of news cameras shortly after a full panel of 12 jurors and six alternates was seated for the former president's hush money trial. Witnesses told the newspaper Azzarello tossed flyers into the air before dousing himself in fluid and setting himself ablaze.

Witness: 'He pulled out a lighter. And he set himself on fire'

A witness who asked to be identified by only his first name, "Dave," told USA TODAY he watched the victim's actions with a growing sense of panic before the young man went up in flames.

"I heard this clap, and this fellow was throwing these papers into the air," the 73-year-old Manhattan resident said. "He had a can and he poured fluid around himself, and which point I thought, 'Oof, I'm going to see something bad here'."

"And sure enough, he pulled out a lighter. And he set himself on fire."

Max Azzarello manifesto: 'I deeply apologize for inflicting this pain upon you'

In a post on a Substack newsletter called "The Ponzi Papers," victim Max Azzarello said he had burned himself alive to draw attention to the U.S. political and economic system.

"My name is Max Azzarello, and I am an investigative researcher who has set himself on fire outside of the Trump trial in Manhattan," the post says.

Azzarello's manifesto took aim at Trump, President Joe Biden, cryptocurrency and the federal government.

"To my friends and family, witnesses and first responders, I deeply apologize for inflicting this pain upon you," he wrote.

Azzarello had lived about three years in a restored two-story apartment building on St. George Street in St. Augustine’s historic district, said Larry Altman, the property’s building manager. He said Azzarello worked from home, doing something online, and had moved in the past few weeks to a home n West Augustine.

”He was just a normal person, nice guy, easy to talk to,” Altman said, but said Azzarello had become focused recently on a belief that a world government was operating a Ponzi scheme against the interests of the public.

“Although I never had a problem with him, he didn’t like authority,” Altman said. “You can’t just not listen to authority and expect to make a change. I think his feeling was that was the only way.”

The Ponzi scheme concerns are underscored in federal court records from New York’s Southern District, where last April Azzarello filed a lawsuit against the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation and scores of other parties including New York University and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The suit asserted the defendants “knowingly conspired, participated in and benefited financially from a decades-long fraudulent scheme.”

The case argued “the defendants’ actions have caused significant financial, emotional, psychological harm to plaintiff,” and listed injuries incurred as financial loss due to economic inflation; damage to personal security; psychological damage as a result of intentional media misinformation; and environmental damage due to fossil fuel emissions created in service of the scheme.

The case was dismissed without prejudice in October.

While Altman said he had never known Azzarello to be abusive to anyone, court records reflect moments when he was accused of strange, disruptive actions.

On Aug. 19, St. Augustine police were called to the Casa Monica Hotel about a complaint that Azzarello had eaten dinner in the building’s restaurant, then approached a wall in the lobby where a framed autograph of President Clinton is displayed and threw a glass of wine at it. The wine stained the autograph and surrounding wall, causing damage a police report estimated at $400-$500, according to a police affidavit .

Police and Azzarello were back at the hotel two days later, where an arrest report said Azzarello was “wearing nothing but his underwear , standing on the sidewalk holding a speaker blasting music and yelling.” He was charged with breach of peace and booked into jail but on August 24 he was arrested again on a criminal mischief charge involving damaging a sign at the front of the Little Free Library at 117 Bridge St.

He was placed on probation, court records show.

A man who lives in house close to Azzarello's old apartment, Richard Loud, said he does not know Azzarello but has seen a car outside he believed to be Azzarello's, notable for its abundance of anti-Clinton and anti-bitcoin stickers.

Azzarello's father, Richard, lives nearby on Keith Street. He was home Friday evening but declined to comment when a reporter approached him.

Aysha Bagchi, Kinsey Crowley and Bart Jansen of USA TODAY and Steve Patterson of The Florida Times-Union and Lucia Viti of the St. Augustine Record contributed to this report.

IMAGES

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🎉 Reflective essay sample paper. Free Reflective Essay Examples
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COMMENTS

Portfolio Essay
A Portfolio Essay is a unique narrative that showcases an individual's skills, experiences, and personal growth. Our guide, enriched with a variety of essay examples, is tailored to help you construct a compelling portfolio essay.This type of essay is crucial for students and professionals alike, as it provides a platform to reflect on and present one's journey and achievements.
PDF Senior Portfolio: Reflective Essay
Senior Portfolio: Reflective Essay Introduction In high school, I had my eyes set on being a Bridgewater Eagle. I knew I wanted to be an Elementary School teacher and I heard of all the wonderful opportunities Bridgewater had to offer their students. When I became accepted, I was thrilled. Many Bridgewater Alumni that are
Documenting Your Learning and Personal Growth: Critical Reflection
5 Documenting Your Learning and Personal Growth: Critical Reflection . Lynn Meade. One key aspect of a portfolio is reflective expression. According to Carole Rodgers, "Reflection is a meaning-making process that moves a learner from one experience into the next with a deeper understanding of its relationship with and connections to other experiences and ideas.
Reflection and Portfolios
The subject of the reflective essay is you and your experiences. You can generally use the first person in a reflective essay. But writing academic reflections, like the one that is due for the English 100/101 portfolio assignment, is a bit different from journaling or keeping a diary: Personal diary/journal. Reflection essay for a course.
Portfolio Assignment
The portfolio is a selection of work that demonstrates your writing abilities and knowledge about writing and critical thinking at the close of EN 111. For the purposes of this class, this assignment will be considered the final. What goes in the Portfolio? Title page (title + optional picture and/or quote) Reflective Essay (~2 pages) A final ...
The Reflective Essay
The reflective essay serves two key purposes in your portfolio: First, it gives your reviewers some insight into your development as a writer and the role writing has played in your Carleton education. Third, and perhaps most importantly, writing the reflective essay allows you, the writer, to stop and consider what you have gained from your ...
How to Write a Reflection Paper in 5 Steps (plus Template and Sample Essay)
Use these 5 tips to write a thoughtful and insightful reflection paper. 1. Answer key questions. To write a reflection paper, you need to be able to observe your own thoughts and reactions to the material you've been given. A good way to start is by answering a series of key questions. For example:
9.1: Portfolio Assignment
The portfolio is a selection of work that demonstrates your writing abilities and knowledge about writing and critical thinking at the close of EN 111. For the purposes of this class, this assignment will be considered the final. What goes in the Portfolio? Title page (title + optional picture and/or quote) Reflective Essay (~2 pages)
Portfolios and learning journals, logs and diaries
'A common ingredient - sometimes a compulsory one - of a portfolio is a learning journal. If you are going to use this, remember to start it soon enough - as soon as you know that a portfolio will be demanded of you…If you keep a "Learning Log", "Learning Journal" or "Learning Diary", you will in fact be reflecting on or thinking about what you are learning.
Using Portfolios in Writing I
A portfolio does. The Reflective Essay. Because of the student's agency in choosing the assignments that go into the portfolio, it should always include the student's assessment of his or her own learning. Known as "the reflective essay" or "the portfolio cover letter," this document can be framed for students in several ways: a "writer's ...
Reflective Practice: Teaching Portfolios
Portfolios are a step toward a more public, professional view of teaching as a scholarly activity. Portfolios can offer a look at development over time, helping one see teaching as an ongoing process of inquiry, experimentation, and reflection. Teaching portfolios capture evidence of one's entire teaching career, in contrast to "course ...
5.9 Portfolio: Subject as a Reflection of Self
Reflect on the development of composing processes. Reflect on how those processes affect your final product. As you develop a writing portfolio over the course of the semester, you will also reflect on your experience and writing process for each project. This section guides you in reflecting on your experience as you developed your profile.
E-Portfolio Reflection Essay
E-Portfolio Reflection Essay. Aaron Hernandez. February 26, 2021. English 110C. Professor Beth Backes. I signed up for English 110C the second semester of my sophomore year at ODU. I started the year feeling good about my writing skills but not completely satisfied. The prior semester I had taken a cybersecurity course that required weekly ...
PDF Portfolio Table of Contents
students will also compose a final reflective essay that synthesizes the Reflective Log and their abilities--i.e., strengths and weaknesses--in meeting all of ICaP's outcomes. In total, the student's reflective logs, final reflection, and portfolio completion should not be more than 10% of the students total grade.
Final Portfolio and Reflection
Outcome 2: Critical Thinking and Reading Resulting in Writing. As they undertake scholarly inquiry and produce their own arguments, students summarize, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate the ideas of others. Outcome 3: Writing as Process. Students understand and practice writing as a process, recursively implementing strategies of research ...
ENG 102
Final Portfolio. Step One Reflective Introduction: The subject of English has never been my strong suit. From this class, there are many things to reflect upon. Throughout this class, I have learned that every essay is not the same outline and execution. Knowing what I know now, I have realized that every writer has a specific voice and way of ...
How to Write 1st Class Reflective Portfolio
How to Write a Good Reflective Portfolio. Be critical. Although the content of a portfolio will be more personalised than other assignments, you should use the same level of critical analysis as you do for any essay or exam. Be comprehensive. Make sure that you include a good range of experiences that exemplify your work throughout the duration ...
50 Best Reflective Essay Examples (+Topic Samples)
A reflective essay is a type of written work which reflects your own self. Since it's about yourself, you already have a topic to write about. For reflective essay examples, readers expect you to evaluate a specific part of your life. To do this, you may reflect on emotions, memories, and feelings you've experienced at that time.
Reflection and Portfolio
24 Reflection and Portfolio Reflection. The final assignment in your English course will include a reflective essay in which you describe your growth as a writer over the course of the semester. This activity of reflecting on your growth and performance is what is called a metacognitive activity: one in which you think and write about your ...
Sean Porter's E-Portfolio: Reflection Essay
Losing that composure destroys my credibility when I attempt to rebut people's arguments, and it is likely to lessen their inclination to listen to my position on the matter at hand. Composure in front of a crowd is probably the skill that I would like to improve the most, next to time management. The only way to improve my presentation skills ...
Reflection on My Portfolio Essay
Good Essays. 1110 Words. 5 Pages. Open Document. Reflection on My Portfolio. Literature has fascinated me from an early age. I was always an extremely active child, yet all I needed to settle down was a good book. The worlds created from the page within my mind were wondrous and amazing. However, I never imagined that I would become an English ...
My Reflection Of My Portfolio
760 Words. 4 Pages. Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. Show More. Portfolio Reflection. Throughout the semester I personally feel as I got a lot of solid concrete information on how to enhance my writing. When I first came into this class I thought to myself "I am going to fail".
Mentor Text Analysis-Ilham Lawani
Unit 1 Education Narrative Essay. Education Narrative Resources; Unit 2 Reflective Annotated Bilbiography. Research Source leads; Unit 3 Genre Assignment with Creator's Statement; Final Portfolio; Final Course Reflection Letter; Readings; Student Work. Introductions; Unit 1; Unit 2; Unit 3; Portfolio; Grammar / Writing Skills Resources ...
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Portfolio Essay

1. Portfolio Essay

2. Student Portfolio Essay

3. College Portfolio Essay

4. Portfolio Summative Reflection Essay

5. Student Portfolio Essay

6. Reflective Portfolio Essay

7. Absolutism and Revolution Portfolio Essay

8.Visual Art Portfolio Essay

9. Portfolio Introduction Essay

10. Portfolio Assessment Essay

11. Portfolio Narrative Essay

12. Portfolio Conclusion Essay

13. English Portfolio Essay

14. Sample Portfolio Essay

What is a Portfolio Essay?

Things to Consider When Writing a Portfolio Essay

What is the first thing that you should do before writing your portfolio essay?

What could be the process when you are writing your portfolio essay online?

What will you do if your professor will not give you any guidelines about portfolio essay writing?

Portfolio Essay Generator

5 Documenting Your Learning and Personal Growth: Critical Reflection

Guiding Principles of Reflection

The Importance of Audience and Purpose

Critical Reflection Using the Three Step Model

Additional Resources

Reflection Exercises

Letter to Your Future Self

Write About Small Moments

Write Six Words

Write About a Signature Assignment

Tell Your Story Digitally

Write About Your Study Abroad with the Four P’s

Portfolios Referenced

Share This Book

The Portfolio – Culminating Activity (Your Final)

The Reflective Essay

Length and Format

Additional Guidelines

Your Reflective essay should NOT:

Your Reflective Essay CAN:

9.1: Portfolio Assignment

Reflective writing: Portfolios and learning journals, logs and diaries

On this page:

Portfolios, learning journals, logs, and diaries

5.9 Portfolio: Subject as a Reflection of Self

Reflective Task

Further Reading

E-Portfolio

E-Portfolio Reflection Essay

Final Portfolio and Reflection

How to Write 1st Class Reflective Portfolio

What Is a Reflective Portfolio?

How Is a Reflective Portfolio Different from Other Types of Academic Assignment?

What Does a Reflective Portfolio Normally Contain?

What Use Are Reflective Portfolios to Students?

How to Write a Good Reflective Portfolio

Mistakes to Avoid in Writing Reflective Portfolios

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24 Reflection and Portfolio

Reflective Learning

How is reflective writing in the academic setting different from journaling or writing in a diary?

What can be gained from metacognitive activities that ask you to reflect on your learning and your performance as a writer?

How can I write a reflective essay?

PRIOR LEARNING

ATTRIBUTIONS

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Mentor Text Analysis–Ilham Lawani

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