Spring Forum 2003 - PETTT Exemplary Student Portfolios
Presentation by Jason Boyd, Kay Balston and Ellie Weiss, Mark Farrelly moderates
Jason Boyd: Six years ago at a National Academic Advising Association conference in Pittsburgh, some really great folks from Bridgewater College in Virginia did a presentation on their personal development portfolio. Now, they being a small college, it's easy to make this something that every student does. It talked a lot about personal dimensions and students were encouraged to think about how they can grow in these areas and further develop themselves in these areas.
We thought it was a wonderful idea. Wasn't something that I was able to accomplish at my school there, the University of Maryland, but then coming here and talking with Kay about the things that our students must deal with, most of my students are pre-med and pre-dent, most of Kay's are nursing, so a lot of commonalties, a lot of the areas of development that you would want someone going into health care to have - to be thinking about things like their ethical and spiritual growth, thinking about them as role models for wellness, thinking about them in their abilities to work across cultures, working with diverse populations, their citizenship.
So we kind of expanded upon the idea that Bridgewater presented with the personal development, made it into eight of these dimensions, and in each of these dimensions we asked the students to think about where they are, how they can develop themselves, provide examples, and of course attach some of the artifacts that reflect many of these things. We started off with paper, Kay's going to tell you how that went and how we migrated to the web.
Kay Balston: Thanks, Jason. Yeah, we started off with paper; it was a disaster (laughter). We were trying to introduce the concept of portfolios, give students sort of some handouts about how to do this and to give them direction. Well, because we were working with pre health science students who were desperately worried about getting into med school, dental school, whatever, they spent the entire workshop time taking notes of every single thing we said - they never asked a question, they never listened, they just wrote. And so we found that sort of a paper introduction and a paper portfolio didn't work very well, it wasn't very reflective, and so we took the questions that we had built into this portfolio, and when My Portfolio became available we started messing around.
Neither one of us had any skill, talent or ability to do this, we just decided it was something we needed to do and talked to Mark a little bit, actually got on the instructor side and started putting the questions in. I discovered that I could build a semi-decent portfolio for students. It took about 3 hours to put it together. Then with some help from Mark, we started it up a little bit and released it to a list of about 50 to 60 selected pre- health science students, pre-med, pre-nursing, people like that.
They tested it out and Ellie, who's with us today, was one of the students who tested it out, gave us some feedback and it has now been put up on the web so that any student can access it. This is a little different than the other portfolios you're going to see because we don't ask students to submit their portfolio to us, it is rather a personal tool for them to use for personal development, to reflect over their experiences over time, to help them build their applications to med school or nursing school. So rather than take any more time, I would like to introduce Ellie Weiss who's going to talk about her experience with this portfolio. Ellie?
Ellie Weiss: Thanks, Kay. And thanks to Jason for making this opportunity available to me and getting me on here. Just want to talk a little bit about my experience as a technophobe and as a returning student. I'm 35 years old and when I was in college we didn't rely so heavily on computers and there's a whole lot of stuff for me to learn and not surprisingly I have a lot of questions about, you know, my status as a returning student and what kind of things that I would need to be thinking about in my quest to apply to medical school and eventually become a physician.
So this portfolio is a chance, as Mark was saying, to collect the information that's relevant to somebody in my position and these are all, in each of these categories is 5 to 10 questions which I guess I'll start going through and showing you but anything that - any one of these things could easily be a 20 minute appointment with an advisor to talk about well, what about this, what about this, and I can sit at any time flexible to my schedule and look at these questions and think about them and reflect as Mark was saying.
So these are - and these categories were chosen by Kay and Jason to reflect the kind of things that they felt that a medical school would be looking for when I write my personal statement, so that's what these are, so this is a chance for me to talk about my personal mission statement and kind of create that. In March I said that my mission statement was to make the world safe for pleasure, which we all deserve, to create a life where responsibility and delight may coexist. I had to kind of come back and put more background there but (laughter) I'm still working on that. Let's see it . . . did I do it? Click go, okay� So up here at the top you can see, these are the questions that they've generated to help me as a student to think about these different issues. And down there is my, what I wrote about it, and let's see -
Jason Boyd: We actually have a handout for the questions too that we'll pass around.
Ellie Weiss: Oh, yeah, that's probably better. Okay, and while I'm sitting here meditating on my citizenship and my community (laughter), Jason and Kay have thoughtfully provided a bunch of links to places in town where I might want to start volunteering and think about donating my time and participating more fully in the community. So that's really helpful, you know, instead of me just sitting there you know, oh, I don't know what I'm doing.
So that's actually been helpful and it's helped me think about, you know, each one of those things could trigger three more thoughts for me. Oh, and then this was just - this was a great place to collect and experience - I went into my volunteer, I just started volunteering at Swedish Hospital screening newborns, there's a neurological screen for newborn hearing testing and I got sent home because I had a cough. I felt fine but the - my supervisor didn't feel good about having me in the room, even with a respiratory mask, with a newborn, coughing.
So that was a really good learning experience about hospital protocol. I'd worked earlier in community health setting where most of the people that we see are pretty well and sometimes, it brought up a medical ethical issue for me about how, just the concern about being infected can be as stressful to people as actually becoming exposed to an illness. So, yeah, this has been helpful for me just in terms of thinking about the questions that an advisor would ask in an interview, in a meeting, that I can think about before I get in so that when I actually get in and talk to Jason, we can talk about something a little more substantial and more having to do with my situation than him having to run through the same list of questions over and over again.
One of the things that I was thinking about is when's the best time to introduce a program like this and for me it was really helpful to have it as soon as possible, at least as soon as I could log on - it wouldn't have been helpful to me before that. The trigger questions are really great and now you have a copy of what those are, and you can refer to that and think about just how those are helpful to get people thinking yeah, this applies to me� Oh, I've got a list of - I'm keeping track of my vaccines, those are those things that we get asked every time we go somewhere - you don't know where it is, but you're pretty sure (laughter) so now I've got it there. I can add to it - I just got another PPD so I could put that in. I'm supposed to get that every year, working in health care settings, so these are just some examples about how it's been a really good collection device for me and hopefully it becomes a better presentation device, the more experience that I have with it. So - thanks.
I'll just show one more thing here. In intellectual growth, I felt really proud of a formal lab report that I wrote in chemistry so I attached that. I doubt I'm going to, you know, need to send that on to somebody somewhere, but I've got it right there, if anybody wants to take a look at it, I can bring it up and say well, at some point I knew Beer's Law (laughter). Oh, I think I started something that I wasn't expecting. Oh, okay, I'm not used to doing that. Okay. So and I know how to use all these different mathematical equations. So - thank you.
Jason Boyd: Going back to the portfolio in the upper right hand - ___ Microsoft Word ____ Internet Explorer.
Ellie Weiss: Okay. Farrelly.
Ellie Weiss: Do we have time for questions or -
Mark Farrelly: We'll save questions for the end, so -
Ellie Weiss: Thank you. (applause)
For more information, please contact pettt@u.washington.edu
