feedback provided align with and enhance the team’s current insights?
1. A current Honors senior said that it would be helpful to have a portfolio to keep track of exactly what you learned from a class, especially the freshmen sequence because it was so long ago. This supports our portfolio idea because it would help Honors students to be able to articulate their Honors experience and take a more active role in preparing for their future. This supports our reasons for choosing the portfolio prototype.
2. An employer said that they always ask about transitions and decisions during interviews. Even if you do not remember why, reflecting on what your experiences have meant will help you be able to explain what you learned from a class or a decision. Being able to articulate this will help you look competent to employers/admissions and help guide your decision-making. The Associate Dean of the Graduate School at GVSU said that knowing how you got to where you are now helps you to be able to demonstrate during interviews that you are adaptable and to provide reasons why, such as experiences you have
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had working in groups, for example. This aligns with and supports what our current prototype focuses on.
3. The Associate Dean of the Graduate School at GVSU said that many times when he asks students what they learned from a class, they say, “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember much.” This supports our insight that many Honors students do not know how to articulate their
experience and the Honors difference. It also aligns with the corresponding needs statement.
4. The Associate Dean of the Graduate School at GVSU mentioned some of the questions that he asks himself for reflection: “What happened? How did it make you feel? And why did you feel that way?” That is an easy, structured way to consciously think about your experiences and the way it affected you. Additionally, “Who are you after this event or experience?” He also told us to remember that this portfolio is not who we are, but simply a reflection of how we got to where we are today. This really helps us to better articulate what the purpose of the portfolio is and how to better understand it conceptually.
5. The Director of Community Engagement told us that it is important for us to embrace change and to continue to reflect on our experiences because life is always changing. That should be something to be expected, not to get anxious about necessarily. He also said that we will carry our education and liberal arts experience with us for the rest of our lives, and that it is totally normal to not know what we are going to be doing 20 years from now or even 5 years from now. We hope that by getting Honors students to reflect on their experiences with the portfolio, that we will help them to be more equipped for their future, where they will have to make decisions and understand what events and feelings have led them to where they are. Getting them to actively engage with their experiences will help them be resilient to and intentional with change and hopefully make them less passively anxious.
APPLY: How can you use the feedback provided?
1. We did not revisit our team problem statement since our last
collaborator debrief, but after seeing the other teams’ revised problem statements and hearing about how this whole project is about getting Honors students more actively engaged in preparing for their futures, we have decided to revise ours. We also got feedback that our
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problem statement as it is now, so we will change our problem statement to be more accurate of what we are focusing on.
2. There seemed to be confusion among the stakeholders about whether the portfolio prototype is for the purpose of the individual Honors student or for a potential employer during an interview. We did not convey well enough that it is up to the student to make what they want of the project. For example, certain majors might find it more helpful to use the portfolio in an interview. Others might use it more solely for personal reflection. We will use this feedback to come up with a clearer name for the portfolio prototype.
3. During the Debrief, none of our stakeholders even mentioned our job shadowing/career event requirements prototype (which may have been because they already discussed that idea during another team’s
presentation), so we have used this to choose the portfolio as our top innovation.
4. A current Honors senior mentioned using the Career Center to create materials and templates for the portfolio. A Brooks College advisor mentioned asked who would be guiding the portfolio and wanted more details as to how it would be implemented/enforced. We can use this to do more research (for example, into the e-portfolios that Honors
students apparently used to do) and come up with more specific details of things that can be included in the prototype and how it will be incorporated into classes and other Honors experiences, like the senior project.
ACT: What are your next steps?
1. Revise our team problem statement.
2. Rename our “mandatory portfolio” prototype to help our stakeholders better understand its purpose.
3. Focus our energy on improving the portfolio prototype, which we have decided is going to be our top prototype. For example, we will research materials from the Career Center that could be helpful for the
portfolio.
4. We will synthesize all the feedback we have gained to reflect on our experience as a team and write our “story,” which will be used in our team video and storyboard concept.
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