Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Zubizarreta is professor of English and director of honors and faculty development at Columbia College, South Carolina. He is a frequent conference presenter and consultant, and he has mentored educators internationally on developing teaching, learning, and administrative portfolios.

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Praise for The Learning Portfolio, Second Edition

"John Zubizarreta understands students, faculty, and teaching and learning. This book will help both novices and senior faculty to use portfolios to increase their own understanding and to enrich their students' learning."
―Wilbert McKeachie, author, McKeachie's Teaching Tips

"With fourteen new chapters featuring exemplary uses of learning portfolios, this second edition is like a brand new book. But it preserves all the recommendations for implementing learning portfolios that made the first edition so useful to faculty."
―Linda B. Nilson, director, Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation, Clemson University, and author, Teaching at Its Best and The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map

"The Learning Portfolio represents a clear, organized, reflective, and effective way to direct and document student learning. It is a must-have for any faculty member or university administrator concerned about demonstrating attainment of important learning outcomes, and for faculty developers assisting instructional staff in designing effective and engaging courses."
―James E. Groccia, director, Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, Auburn University, and former president, Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education

"The Learning Portfolio provides a credible tool for assessing and improving student learning―critical aspects when documenting program and institutional effectiveness. John Zubizarreta's clear and pragmatic discussion of the learning portfolio empowers all who care about student learning to succeed in ways that can make a transformative difference in the lives of students."
―Mary Lou Higgerson, vice president for academic affairs and dean, Baldwin-Wallace College, and coauthor, Effective Leadership Communication

"If we want students to become self-directing learners, they must become more aware of themselves as learners. There is no other tool that has more power to contribute to this process than well-designed learning portfolios."
―L. Dee Fink, author, Creating Significant Learning Experiences

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Praise for The Learning Portfolio, Second Edition

"John Zubizarreta understands students, faculty, and teaching and learning. This book will help both novices and senior faculty to use portfolios to increase their own understanding and to enrich their students' learning."
—Wilbert McKeachie, author, McKeachie's Teaching Tips

"With fourteen new chapters featuring exemplary uses of learning portfolios, this second edition is like a brand new book. But it preserves all the recommendations for implementing learning portfolios that made the first edition so useful to faculty."
—Linda B. Nilson, director, Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation, Clemson University, and author, Teaching at Its Best and The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map

"The Learning Portfolio represents a clear, organized, reflective, and effective way to direct and document student learning. It is a must-have for any faculty member or university administrator concerned about demonstrating attainment of important learning outcomes, and for faculty developers assisting instructional staff in designing effective and engaging courses."
—James E. Groccia, director, Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, Auburn University, and former president, Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education

"The Learning Portfolio provides a credible tool for assessing and improving student learning—critical aspects when documenting program and institutional effectiveness. John Zubizarreta's clear and pragmatic discussion of the learning portfolio empowers all who care about student learning to succeed in ways that can make a transformative difference in the lives of students."
—Mary Lou Higgerson, vice president for academic affairs and dean, Baldwin-Wallace College, and coauthor, Effective Leadership Communication

"If we want students to become self-directing learners, they must become more aware of themselves as learners. There is no other tool that has more power to contribute to this process than well-designed learning portfolios."
—L. Dee Fink, author, Creating Significant Learning Experiences

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The Learning Portfolio

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

THE CONCEPT OF THE STUDENT PORTFOLIO has been widely known and implemented for some time in academic fields such as English, journalism, and communications. Similarly, portfolios have been a staple form of documentation of performance skills in the fine arts, providing students and teachers with a method for displaying and judging evidence of best practice and samples of the full range of students' talents. Another popular application has been to provide a device for demonstrating the value of experiential learning or for assessing credit for prior learning in a program of adult education. Some portfolios are shared by students and faculty advisers for the purpose of academic advising and career counseling, a use strongly advocated by the National Academic Advising Association, which provides on its Web site (www.nacada.ksu.edu/AAT/NW26_1.htm) a rationale and a number of sample guidelines for advising portfolios as well as models derived from institutions such as Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, the Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Denver (www.nacada.ksu.edu/Clearinghouse/AdvisingIssues/portfolio examples.htm). Also, in business and teacher education, portfolios have been used as effective tools for career preparation. The contribution in this volume of Drexel University's LeBow College of Business portfolio project is a good example of the practical benefits of a thoughtful portfolio system. In teacher education, for accreditation purposes, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education advocates the portfolio model as an effective tool for showcasing a representative breadth of acquired skills for professional success and career preparation, using specified licensure competencies and professional standards as benchmarks against which to measure achievements signified by portfolio artifacts (www.ncate.org).

Such applications predominately have targeted the portfolio's efficacy in gathering judiciously selected products of student work to display content mastery or job readiness. Writing portfolios, for example, have been used generously in composition, creative writing, and other types of communication courses to present a diverse profile of a student's creative and technical skills. Used in this way, the portfolio is an enhancement to a writing, speech, business, leadership, or computer-information-systems teacher's comprehensive assessment of a student's growth during a particular course or at the end of an enrichment program, an academic major, or a general education core with goals, objectives, and competencies in writing and other areas. Undoubtedly, the portfolio is both an intellectually stimulating process and a product with keen utilitarian properties.

Yet, despite the history of portfolios in certain disciplines, the portfolio approach to gauging student accomplishments and growth in learning-while not entirely new in higher education-has historically received more attention in the K-12 arena. In English and a few other disciplines in college classes, portfolios, journals, and more recently, digital storytelling strategies have been employed with some regularity, but remarkably, higher education has lagged behind the grade schools in innovating and refining such persuasive learning tools. Today, following the groundswell of interest in teaching, administrative, course, and institutional portfolios, learning portfolios are attracting significant attention in college and university settings. Now the numerous Web sites that provide information on portfolios-and that especially offer rich and diverse models of how electronic or digital portfolios are used for multiple purposes-are coming predominantly from colleges and universities around the world. Countries such as Australia, Britain, Canada, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, and of course, the United States-just to name a few-are home to institutions with student portfolio programs designed to help with systematic learning-outcomes assessment plans. Arter and Spandel (1992);Gordon(1994);Wright, Knight, and Pomerleau (1999);and Cambridge (2001) are a few print resources that demonstrate the interest in portfolios in higher education. Helen Barrett (www.electronicportfolios. com); the ePortConsortium (www.eportconsortium.org); the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (www.merlot. org); the Electronic Portfolio Action and Communication network (http:// eportfolio.merlot.org); the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research (http://ncepr.org); EDUCAUSE (www.educause.edu); the Europortfolio (www.europortfolio.org) consortium; EPICS-2 (www.eportfolios. ac.uk), a collaboration of several UK institutions dedicated to e-portfolio development, with strong emphasis on medical education; and other Web sites are among the numerous sources for online information on electronic portfolios in colleges and universities around the world. Following Seldin's (2004) work on teaching portfolios, learning portfolios are clearly now main-stream in higher education.

A Focus on Learning

In addition to the diverse applications already mentioned, Burch (1997) suggests a few other uses of portfolios: "They can reveal, in the aggregate, the state of an academic program; they can provide valuable insights into what students know and how they construct that knowledge; they can provide institutional barometers, if you will, that suggest programmatic highs and lows, strengths and weaknesses" (p. 263). His comment hints that often what is left out of the formula in student portfolios is an intentional focus on learning, the deliberate and systematic attention not only to skills development and career readiness but also to a student's self-reflective, metacognitive appraisal of how and, more importantly, why learning has occurred. This is not to assert, of course, that learning does not happen at all when portfolios are used only as collection and organizing devices, that a student does not benefit simply from the thoughtful act of choosing representative samples of accomplished work and making sense of the materials as a display. But more significant learning is likely to occur if the student is encouraged to come to terms self-consciously over the duration of an academic endeavor-for example, a semester course, the culmination of an honors program, the achievement of general education goals, or the completion of a degree-with essential questions about learning itself:

How have such products as those collected in a portfolio over time contributed to significant higher-order learning? What has the student learned from the process of generating the work and from collecting it, selecting it, analyzing its value, pondering its integration and future applications? How does the work fit into a larger framework of lifelong learning that goes beyond simply completing graded assignments? Why was the work valuable in the student's overall cognitive, social, ethical, spiritual development?

Imagine how such an opportunity for mentored, critical reflection and for immediate assessment of learning grounded in direct outcomes or products can benefit all our students, especially after carefully and intentionally integrating reflective...