Reflective Writing

The key to a good ePortfolio is reflection on your learning process. Your portfolio isn’t just a list of assignments and products — it’s an opportunity for you to narrate what and how you learned. That’s important, because it means that you’re not limited to showcasing the things that “worked,” and a good grade doesn’t depend on doing things perfectly the first time. You can talk about the times when things went wrong or took an unexpected turn, and you can demonstrate how you revised your work along the way. Those challenges and how you responded to them are all part of the learning process.

Artifacts

Artifacts are the building blocks of your portfolio. An artifact is any piece of evidence that you use to demonstrate your learning. It could be an assignment, like a source analysis or a digital project. But think broadly and use your imagination! For some learning outcomes, the best artifacts are actually the work you do along the way rather than the assignment itself. Here are some examples of good artifacts and how you might use them:

• Working on an Information Literacy outcome? Maybe you compiled a really good bibliography for your digital project that shows how you used a range of reliable sources to understand your topic from multiple points of view.
• To demonstrate Problem-Solving Skills, consider some of your planning documents like mind maps and outlines that demonstrate how you approach a problem’s different facets.
• For Reading, your notes and annotations on assigned readings are a great way to show how you’re engaging with the text and making connections across other course content.

This is not an exhaustive list! There are lots of other artifacts you can include. The key with each of these is to not just identify what the artifact is, but to clearly and specifically articulate how it relates to the learning outcome. In general, you should expect to write about a paragraph per artifact.

Reflection/Storytelling Ideas

As you work on identifying good artifacts and explaining their significance, here are a few prompts that might help you describe your learning process.

• How did your interests change and grow in this class? Was there a particular topic that really grabbed your interest? Did this class help you understand your major differently, or vice versa?
• What did you learn through collaboration? Maybe your group members shared perspectives that changed how you thought about a topic, or your community partner’s experience on the ground added a new perspective to your academic research.
• You can write about the process of collaboration too! Did you take on a different role in your group than you expected? How did your group manage all of its resources and tasks? Are there ways to improve your collaborations in the future?
• Problems are inevitable, but they can be productive! Think about a time in this class when things didn’t go as planned. Describe the problem and its impacts. If it was something in your control, how did you address it? If it was outside of your control, how did you pivot?