October 7, 2001

Reflecting and building ...

After the last few TI sessions, you should feel relatively comfortable getting feedback from your colleagues. You certainly may continue to use the Reflecting Scaffold.  This Word document provides you with a scaffold for your four reflections as you refine selected portfolio artifacts and place them in the Product section of your portfolio. You may elect to modify the format or devise another format that addresses the established review criteria.

The Reflection Scaffold document is only meant to be a support tool that gets you started on the reviewing, reflecting, revising process. It leaves room for your decisions as to how you might adjust to this process. That's what a scaffold is. You use it when you need it. However, many of you seemed to collect some highly relevant feedback to enable reflection in the last few weeks, and the Reflection Scaffold may just be the tool you need to keep this process alive through the remaining artifact revisions.

There is quite a bit of literature on the subject of reflecting and composing. If you are interested in a review of the literature on Scaffolding Graduate Student Portfolios, we've placed a pdf of that review on the server.

For your Phorum assignment for this week, you don't actually need to use the Phorum.

• If you need it, use the Reflection_Scaffold tool and follow the directions on the document.
• Look over some iMET Portfolios and set up the Product section of your iMET Portfolio according to the review criteria.
• By the end of this week, you should have all the feedback you need to prepare the Product section of your iMET Portfolio. If you need faculty feedback on any artifacts, email Mike, Mary-Ann and/or Bruce.
• Below are some Product sections to look over from previous iMET and Cohort students.
  • Pat Cory:  Pat is a 5th grade teacher in Rio Linda.  She has more reflections than she needed, but her format for presenting her artifacts is clear.  In the bottom frame of her Product section (called Illustrative Work by the Rio Linda cohort) the user can click on either the product itself or the reflection.  The user can also get back to the splash page with relative ease.
  • Neal Edwards:  Neal is a science teacher from San Juan.  He clearly delineates the three sections of his portfolio. In the link provided here, Neal directs the user to the reflections which link to the actual artifacts.  Clicking on Process will take the user back to Neal's splash page.
  • Alix Peshette:  Alix teaches in Davis at a junior high school.  She is an iMET 1 graduate and provides a very clear example of the Product section in this link with easy navigation throughout her web.