Portfolio Assessment: Non-Reflective Utterances

This year my action research for Teachers Network Leadership Institute revolves around helping my students become more reflective about their work. My goal is for them to learn how to look at their work and see their own learning and progress.

One way that I’m trying to help my students do this kind of work is through portfolio assessment. Since NYC high schools are run on a semester basis, my students completed portfolios in January and presented them to me in one-on-one conferences. I digitally recorded all of their conferences and analyzed the recordings in order to see what I could learn.

I learned that there is a definite divide between students who can do this reflective thinking and those students who cannot. The divide doesn’t always exist oe the same continuum as grades, though. I found many “high achieving” students unable to speak reflectively about their work; I found many “underachieving” students very much aware of what they were learning and not learning.

After listening to their conferences (over 20 hours worth), I was able to classify their comments about their work into types of non-reflective and reflective utterances. In this post, I will discuss the non-reflective; in the next post, I will share the reflective utterances.

Types of Non-Reflective Utterances Made During Portfolio Presentations

1. Naming – The student gives the "title" of a piece of work. "This is my character sketch. (Turns the page.) This is my freewriting." Naming could appear alone or could be part of another utterance. Students often named work and then had other comments to make about it. If that is the case, then the other comment determines the reflectiveness of the utterance. Much of the time, though, students just named the work and this is non-reflective.
2. Summarizing – The student explains what the assignment is about, but does not mention about what he learned. "This is my character sketch. We made up a character and wrote a story about him."
3. Process – Non-Reflective Type – The student explains the steps of assignment. "This is my character sketch. First, we brainstormed on what kind of character we wanted to      write. Then, we made up a whole bunch of facts about him like his birthday and his favorite color. Then we decided on the important traits about our character..." This is closely related to summarizing, but differs in that the student explains the steps of the assignment as if he were giving directions on how to complete it.
4. Teacher-Centered Assessment - Student cites that he learned something from the work because the teacher marked it as such. "I learned a lot from this piece of work and you can tell because you gave me a good grade."

These non-reflective utterances appeared in all the students’ presentations to some degree. Often, they appear when the student lacks the language to talk about the work. In an attempt to say something about a piece of work when they don’t know what they learned from it, students will use one of these types of utterances.

Students who were very adept at talking reflectively about their work, though, used these utterances sparingly and were able to talk reflectively at length about most of their work. But, many students made solely non-reflective utterances about their work. There were several like this and it was difficult to ascertain whether or not they never thought about what they could learn from doing the work or whether they just couldn’t talk about it. There were a couple from whom I really got the impression that they completed the assignments and never once considered what it was they were supposed to gain from it. They did the work simply to get it done and moved on. Even when questioned further about their work – questions meant to lead them to be more reflective – they looked blankly at me and repeated the same non-reflective utterance or perhaps made another non-reflective utterance. 

This makes me wonder if I can really teach students to be more reflective of their work or just speakmore reflectively.

UPDATE:  See the follow up post about Reflective Utterances ...

 

Comments

[Bronwyn G]

It's not that they don't know how to be reflective, Mr Frederick.

Ugh! Aren't those students expaserating for a teacher? The ones who do things just to get stuff done and their credits?

My own poetry folio was something like this, but we only has 120 words to do it in.