Presentation by Susan Templeton, Mark Farrelly moderates

Mark Farrelly: Thank you, Jason. And thank you to all the FIG leaders for showing off the online style editor that's built into the portfolio tool, all of those colors were shocking and wonderful (laughter). Next, we have Susan Templeton who's a senior career counselor for the Center for Career Services and the student, Johannah Blue, whose portfolio she'll be showing actually couldn't join us today, but she gracefully let us show her portfolio for her and so I'll let Susan come up and I'll help you drive, I guess.

Susan Templeton: So thanks, Mark. I am working with a team of counselors to teach a course called Navigating Career Options and we've been teaching this course for a number of years and we've always had a portfolio as one of the requirements. I am passing out the syllabus for that course right now. But up until this year, that portfolio project was always a paper one, usually a binder and it was handed in at the end of the course - at the beginning of the course we talked about what portfolios were, the differences between learning portfolios and career portfolios, and then fairly open - ended with the students about what their portfolio might look like, giving them some examples at the beginning of the course.

Well, with the portfolio tool materializing, or not just materializing, being developed through a lot of work, we were part of a group that initially gave some feedback on what we'd like to see in a portfolio with the idea of career portfolio in mind. And we decided, still in development, that we would give it a try and try it out in our Navigating Career Options class. So we've had some challenges with it. One of them is that a career portfolio is quite different from a learning portfolio and a learning portfolio works well accompanying a class, kind of working with the students, a lot of reflection as they go through a process. And a career portfolio is something that is more specific and is designed for a targeted audience to accompany an application or an interview, let's say a job interview, or application to an academic program.

And that was one of the challenges is working with the electronic portfolio tool in the course of a class, the students are really kind of discovering through the process what their target might be, but I've actually found this quarter, in getting through it, that that's a benefit. Because having the portfolio tool, I can interact with the students, give them feedback as they're developing their portfolio. And the next phase that we're about to go into in the class is taking the portfolio that they've developed in response to class assignments and helping them see how they can use their class portfolio and all the artifacts that they have put together and shape it into a targeted portfolio for specific audiences.

So what I'd like to do is show you first a little bit of the instructor's side, show you what the portfolio assignments were, and how I responded to Johannah, and then show you Johannah's portfolio which is about nine tenths finished at this point - we're still in the course. So let me just log in... Okay, we're calling it My Career portfolio and there are eight, actually nine assignments. The first introduction was familiarizing the students with what a portfolio was and asking them to go to some websites, see some examples. Then I asked the students to practice - oh, actually we are in the next box - oh, okay, yeah. Then I asked the students to bring in an exercise that we did in class to a computer lab where we met to practice uploading an artifact. I wanted to make sure that all the students were familiar with the tool.

In my class this quarter I have 16, 18 students registered and they're, interestingly enough, evenly divided among freshmen, sophomore, juniors and seniors, so they're at very different points in where they are in school and why they took this Navigating Career Options class. About half of them, actually a little more than half of them, are trying to figure out what to major in. Some of them are at the freshman stage so they're anticipating what that process might be like and others are juniors and they've received letters from the university saying you must choose a major, so they have different levels of urgency in terms of going through this process. And then we have seniors who are thinking about well, how does my major connect with career options?

So quite a wide range and I found the freshmen and some of the sophomores were much more comfortable and savvy with using an electronic portfolio tool than seniors were, who were the most uncomfortable, so that's kind of encouraging. I think we owe some of that to Jason Johnson and the FIG program, but I think, as we go on, this tool will become more and more natural for students. So anyway, my first assignment, my best experiences, was designed to kind of get them all on the same page, comfort with the tool... What I'm going to do now is go into Johannah's portfolio so you can see some of her responses.

From the instructor's view, this is my class list and I can see who's submitted what and when. And when they submit, I have an opportunity to respond to them, to the reflection that they've had, so their first assignment was for the purpose of becoming familiar with completing the assignments - list your top ten good experiences from a good experiences exercise that I assigned the first day of class. So these are Johannah's top ten good experiences. I also asked them to reflect back on their learning experiences - in high school and the different years that they were in college, and to select of all of those learning experiences, what was their best learning experience and Johannah's was her freshman year of high school, deciding to try out for the crew team.

So this is my response to her reflection - your best experience provides examples of a number of skills, and what I'm trying to do here is to get them to start thinking about their experiences in terms of the skills that they demonstrate, and we look at lots of experiences in this class and look at how their patterns of skills that occur over the different experiences. And then to practice loading an artifact, I made it really simple - I asked them to write about their very best experience using Word, a Word document, and then to upload that into the portfolio tool. My response to all the students was I really focused on some skills and strengths that were evident in that best experience, some things that I was seeing that they were describing, whether explicitly or implicitly.

Then we also did an exercise in class where they got into small groups and they shared with their peers some of their good experiences, and they got feedback from their peers, so they have a lot of examples at the end of this first set of assignments, of skills and strengths and how they repeat across different good experiences. And then of all the skills that they received as feedback, I have them list that in the portfolio tool, then choose those that they think they're particularly good at, their strengths, and then a short description paragraph that pulls of all those strengths together, describing them at their best.

So going through in each of these, I've given some feedback, so this is something that is an added feature to using the portfolio tool from a traditional paper portfolio. As I said, the students, they get the assignment - sometimes they would come and interact with us as instructors about it, but more often than not the next time we hear or see about their portfolio was at the end of the class where they'd be handing the completed portfolio in. And it ranged from being a portfolio that showed evidence of reflection and also who their audience was that would be viewing this to portfolios that really looked more like family scrapbooks. So the portfolio tool has given us this wonderful opportunity to easily interact with the students, give them feedback, and sometimes they get the feedback and they resubmit the assignments based on that, so throughout the course of the quarter we're participating in their reflection process. So what I'd like to do now is show you the published version of Joe's portfolio and talk a little bit more about the assignments as I do that...

Mark Farrelly: Pardon me while I arrange myself here.

Susan Templeton: While Mark's getting her portfolio up, let me just talk a little bit more about the rest of the assignments. After the students look at experiences and examine them for skills and strengths, then we talk about some of the things that you might do to present that information to selected audiences and one format, one very typical one when you're involved in career and job search is a resume so their assignment was to complete a resume and then to incorporate some of the strengths and transferable skills that they'd learned into a summary statement and put that into their resume and upload that in.

Then we started to get more into the career exploration, we'd done a number of exercises, career exercises besides skills and strengths, the students went through some typical career assessments like the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, the Strong Interest Inventory that looks at interests and patterns of interests and how they relate to careers. And given all the information that they were gathering about themselves, we started to do some exercises about daydreaming about ideal careers or ideal positions, ideal jobs and that was an assignment that they had for the career portfolio so let me show you Jo's assignment for that...

Okay, she's saying here her ideal position allows her to constantly interact with people and providing service, helping them in some capacity, loving to work with children and then based on what she's really found out more about herself, some of these things she probably already knew but the assignments we went through helped her think about that, she realized that she wanted to be in a fairly structured environment that allowed her to be a decision maker and that she would be able to use her leadership skills. And I asked them to choose a picture from a magazine or from the web that depicted what they thought their ideal work environment might be and this is what Jo chose. She loaded it as an artifact...

Okay, what she's gravitating toward is she originally had come to the university thinking that she might aspire to medical school and started to register as a premed but she found out that the course load of science went well beyond what she really wanted to do, typically chemistry courses, but she was still very interested in health care careers. So she's exploring some options in health care and this picture that she chose is a medical professional working in a neonatal ward and she's looking at some of the related health care fields like nursing, physician's assistant, etc. So this is a picture that she found that she thought typified her ideal work situation.

I then asked them to choose three different areas to explore. If their task in taking this class was to help them clarify and choose a major, then they were to choose three different majors that they thought would be a good match based on all the things that we had covered in class. If it was careers, looking at three different career areas, and we went through some sessions in class about how do you explore and research different options, some resources in terms of websites, books, printed materials, but also how important it was to talk to people and also try some things out, do some things, experiential learning kind of things, internships, volunteering, etc.

And this assignment was to, based on what they knew about themselves and after having fantasized about an ideal position, what were three options that they wanted to do some research and connect with what they knew about themselves. And we're really big in career counseling and academic counseling about having a Plan B and a Plan C. But so many of the folks that we work with are pretty fixated on that Plan A, so this exercise was designed to get beyond Plan A and start thinking about Plan B and Plan C... So Jo has picked physician's assistant, nursing, and then her third choice which she hadn't mentioned up to this point but maybe it was because she needed to select a third option, was child counseling or developmental psychology, and then in looking at it she realized that this option would connect with her major, psychology, or her intended major, psychology, which she was very interested in.

The artifacts that she chose to attach to each of these were websites that she had used to research, this is the APA website - I love that picture. I'll show you one more piece with Jo's - I think this mouse has a hairball (laughter) - okay, their most recent assignment was to do an informational interview and Jo chose to speak to one of our previous speakers, Kay Balston, who serves as the pre nursing advisor here on campus. And she's explaining the questions that she asked Kay, some of the things that she learned with Kay, some of the activities they did together, what she learned from that conversation that she needs to do, and the key thing that she learned which she needed to do was to be competitive for a nursing program and physician's assistants programs, she needs to volunteer for about 100 hours in a health care setting, so that's something that she is - that's one of her next steps, tasks to do.

The final assignment which the class hasn't yet done is called My Future and it's to look in advance 5 years, 10 years and describe the kind of work environment they see themselves in, who do they see themselves interacting with, what are their responsibilities, etc. In talking with Jo, if she were here to show this herself and share with you how she's benefited from these exercises, she shared with me that this kind of tool really makes you think, I think reflection is its hallmark, it really makes you think about some things. A lot of issues, yeah, I kind of knew that health care, if I wasn't going to be a pre med physician's assistant, nursing were options and that I needed to take certain classes, but because of going through this and going through the exercises with the portfolio tool, it really made me think about these options, how they connect with who she is, and also what are the resources, who's out there, how important it is to talk to people and also what are some next steps that she might take.

So in the class what we're going to do as a group is, once these assignments are completed, we're going to be working on showing the students how they can take these assignments, the artifacts, and tailor them into customized portfolios that they can use as career portfolios for specific purposes, like application to a nursing program or to career. So that's an overview of what we've been doing in careers and the challenge has been creating a career portfolio when we're really using a tool as a learning process-oriented tool that now that I'm nearing the end of that, I'm finding that yeah, this is an incredibly valuable way, the ways that I've been able to interact with the students, they've been able to interact with me, has been much different than we could have - than we interact without it, and I think it's been an added benefit. So, thank you (applause).

For more information, please contact pettt@u.washington.edu