E-Portfolios and Reflective Practice
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I am Margaret Plack and I am the Director of the Doctor of Physical Therapy Program here at George Washington University. I am by nature, a reflective practitioner. I really very strongly believe in the reflective process and the use of reflection. I teach professionals so it’s key to being a real professional, to be able to look back on what you’ve done, analyze how well you’ve done, and if you’ve done something well to it even better, and if you’ve not done something quite so well, then figure out a way to improve it. And so when we made a transition to the doctorate physical therapy program I wanted to make sure we included a component of reflection in that curriculum. The other piece was we have an accreditation process and we have to show our creditors that we meet our mission.
So I had to step back and say “how do we really show our creditors that our students are social advocates or that our students demonstrate care and compassion or that they are reflective practitioners?” So I took the two of them and put it together and thought the only way I can really demonstrate to our creditors that we do meet our mission is to develop this portfolio. So we developed the portfolio around our mission. I will say that some of the students just love it, some of the students not so much. What we tried to do is put structure around it and we structured it, again, based on the elements of our mission. So there is structure there, so for those students who really don’t even know where to begin to reflect, it gives them a structure to start.
They are required to make sure that they have put something that addresses every element of the mission and that they have some done element of reflection and that they have done some element of self assessment and development of goals for themselves. We introduce it to them in the very first semester. We give them the structure, we give them the rationale. We tell them why it’s important. We tell them why we believe it’s important. We then really encourage them to make it their own. So you give them the structure, but make it flexible enough and encourage a whole lot of creativity. They decide what they want to put in; they decide what’s important to them. We tell them, sometimes, the best learning experience is something you really messed up on, so it is good to put some errors in there. It’s ok to own up to the mistake you made and then say what you learned from that. So again, we leave it really broad and really open for them to decide what it is they want to put in there. So, structure, flexibility, add some creativity to it.
In their capstone course, we have them go back and require a little bit more creativity. We require them to do some narration. We require them to put some pictures in there. Something to make it more personal. Something to make it so that they will want to look back on it. And then we have them share it in small groups with classmates. As a group, they select certain pieces they’ll present to the whole class. And so, while some of them have brought along kicking and screaming early on, by the end I think they really do enjoy the process. When our creditors came to reaccredit the program, they asked us how we can demonstrate how we met our mission. We gave them our student portfolios and there it was. Perfect evidence of how we met the mission.
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