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Create. Share. Engage.
David Hicks: The portfolio tells the story of growth
Prof Dr David Hicks is a Professor of History and Social Science Education at Virginia Tech in the U.S.A. He's been teaching with portfolios for over 20 years supporting teacher candidates on their journey to become professionals.
In this episode he talks about how he and his team integrate portfolios into a capstone course in the teacher training programme at Virginia Tech (VT), what scaffolds they employ, and how the supports in place help students create portfolios that emphasise reflection. The basis of his portfolio work is folio thinking and the ePortfolio development framework that he and his team have developed over the course of time.
Resources
- Hicks, D., Allen, A., & Evers, S. (2025). Folio thinking in teacher education: A case study on the evolution of reflective ePortfolio assignments. AePR ePortfolio Review, Winter / Spring 2025, 19–29.
- Parkes, K. A., Dredger, K., & Hicks, D. (2013). ePortfolio as a measure of reflective practice. International Journal of ePortfolio, 3(2), 99–115.
- Penny Light, T., Chen, H. L., & Ittelson, J. C. (2011). Documenting learning with ePortfolios: A guide for college instructors. Jossey-Bass.
Connect with Virginia Tech School of Education in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences
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- Debra Hoven: The value of self-reflection and peer feedback
- Bob Reuter: Externalise your thinking with portfolios
Click through to the show notes for the transcript.
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Production information
Production: Catalyst IT
Host: Kristina Hoeppner
Artwork: Evonne Cheung
Music: The Mahara tune by Josh Woodward
Welcome to'Create. Share. Engage.' This is the podcast about portfolios for learning and more for educators, learning designers, and managers keen on integrating portfolios with their education and professional development practices. 'Create. Share. Engage.' is brought to you by the Mahara team at Catalyst IT. My name is Kristina Hoeppner. Today I'm speaking with Professor Dr David Hicks from Virginia Tech. He, Dr Amy Allen, and newly minted Dr Sara Evers wrote the article 'Folio thinking in teacher education: A case study on the evolution of reflective ePortfolio assignments' in the latest issue of the AAEEBL ePortfolio Review. David, thank you so much for making time today for our chat.
David Hicks:Thank you. Thanks for the invite.
Kristina Hoeppner:David, what do you do at Virginia Tech, please?
David Hicks:I am a Professor of History and Social Science Education, and so I work with undergraduates and graduate students, basically preparing teachers. And then I also have a PhD programme for people who want to be university professors or Social Studies supervisors, and Sara was one of my doctoral students, and actually just graduated this May.
Kristina Hoeppner:David, with you being a Professor of History and Social Science Education, it does make good sense that in your biography, you do put a historical marker in it; just looking at the AePR one, you said, "He is a great" - so you,"great grandson of David Carter who can be found in the Metropolitan Police Register of Habitual Criminals of 1881-1925."
David Hicks:He was born in York, is Yorkshire born, Yorkshire bred, and one of his first crimes was stealing horses. If people question my ethics, it's in my genetics now. So it's not my fault [Kristina laughs]. Blame a great granddad.
Kristina Hoeppner:When did you start using portfolios yourself? Because in the case study, you said your work in teacher education goes back to 2013. Was that the first time or have you already been using portfolios before then?
David Hicks:We've been using it before. So basically, in 2013 some other colleagues and I wrote a paper about our initial work that started in the early 2000s. So we were kind of just laying out there some of the work we were doing to create this as an assessment and how we assessed portfolios. I've been doing it in Social Studies, and it was Kelly Parkes in Music Education at the time. And, you know, in the early 2000s probably from 2005, maybe 2006, 2007 we've been doing electronic portfolios as a capstone to the teacher education programme.
Kristina Hoeppner:That's a long history that you can look back at. So it's nice to see the evolution a bit in the case study that you had published in AePR on folio thinking. What is folio thinking and how does it come into play in your portfolio practice?
David Hicks:From the very beginning, we have a number of people at Virginia Tech, a number of colleagues who do portfolios.
Kristina Hoeppner:Is that in different departments to yours or in your own department?
David Hicks:Yes, well, in the School of Education. So the Elementary Ed do their portfolio as a capstone, and Maths do theirs, and Science does theirs, Social Studies me, History and Social Science does mine, English does theirs. I've typically worked with the History and Social Science people and also the English people. I have always had a little bit of a bugaboo about what you should be doing in a portfolio. Even up to this semester, when I've been on other people's committees, I still tell my students that we do a proper portfolio where you're really being forced to engage in reflective reasoning to explain the what, the why, and how of your teaching practice, and consider how your reasoning and explanations will inform your future practice. So just to be aware, you're aware of what you're doing, rather than unaware when you're teaching. I still have colleagues who I think they have students who just throw up a couple of artieacts and they just describe the artefact. That's just a scrapbook. It's not really what a portfolio should be about. Folio thinking, then, to me, remains this idea of assembling artefacts from over time or space, and it's reflective, it's a recursive process in which my teacher candidates will collect, select, reflect, and connect their experiences and artefacts in order to construct a meaningful narrative of their growth, and then what that means for their future growth. The aim, then is to help them move beyond just a check box of look,'I've answered this standard' to really being metacognitively aware of what you're doing and providing evidence-based claims to support your narrative of why did you teach this way? What have I learned? And how am I growing? Folio thinking is this metacognitive way of explaining your actions and and showing a level of awareness about what it means to teach and learn for me, not just a me having a lesson planned up and just saying, 'Oh, I did this lesson on whatever.' One of the reasons why I've got to this stage of folio thinking, and I've often thought about this, and I've said this to my students, a lot of them are in - they're in the social sciences, and you are expected to work with evidence, make claims, make citations, make inferences within your own work around a subject. So in history, it's very evidence-based. And so I try to get them to realise that basically, they are sourcing their own experiences. They're collecting sources, they're choosing which ones apply, they're breaking them down, and then they are looking for critical incidents that they can talk about, and then couple them together. So you tightly couple artefacts over time to try and capture and build a narrative that's evidence-based. I tried to talk about that as a disciplinary disposition that we have into the social sciences and that can serve as well when you think about your portfolio, which is capturing a journey of your growth over time and then being able to explain it and how what you've done makes sense based on learning theory and how it will also support your future growth as you enter into the profession.
Kristina Hoeppner:It's really good to have that definition of folio thinking available. You put it nicely into the ePortfolio development framework that you're sharing in your case study. Because in the ePortfolio development framework, just to recap a bit what you had said earlier, you do talk about the collecting, selecting, reflecting, and connecting. So all of these four activities being crucial and needing to be present in a portfolio so that we can call it a portfolio, that it's not just that collection of artefacts, but really also what was important of the artefacts that you've collected, and why are they important? And then how do they connect to the further learning story or maybe also having connections to other people. So that we are really telling that story, rather than only looking at individual pieces of artefacts Having that definition from Helen Chen and then also expanded on it by others, available does give us that very nice framework that I think is also really nicely explainable because it does make good sense of not sharing everything with everybody because nobody ever has time to just hear everything from zero to 100 or 1,000 but really selecting critical components or critical incidents and then reflecting on those and weaving that into the existing learning journey, as well as where you want to go in the future.
David Hicks:Yes, absolutely.
Kristina Hoeppner:How do you introduce the ePortfolio development framework to your students so that they get into the practice of creating those, what you called "proper portfolios", rather than just the summaries of their activities?
David Hicks:This has taken a long time to develop, and I still keep iterating and tweaking on it. So I have the students, the master students, it's just a 15-month programme, and I have them for two semesters, so I have them for the fall and spring, and the undergraduates, I also have them for the fall and spring. That's the final year for both. So I'm fortunate to have them for a whole year. That helps me scaffold it over time. From the very beginning of the fall semester, they learn about the portfolio pretty quickly. I talk about it being the very final thing they'll do. It looks like the portfolio defence is an exam, but I say, "It is a celebration of your growth. It's the celebration of your growth and the journey to the other side of the desk from student to teacher. By the time you get there, it's not about whether you pass or fail. You will know exactly what you're doing. You'll be proud of your work, and we will have celebratory presentations." How does it scaffold? Well, to me, the scaffolding is actually essential because reflection doesn't happen automatically. It's something that's got to be supported. You've got to nudge students in certain ways. And what I've also found is that often they've got all these courses, and as they go through life, they take a course, and then it's done. It's checked off, take a course, checked off. And sometimes they take assignments and they kind of do them, and then they're in isolation. I don't think they ever realise that often professors are really trying to connect things together across classes, so they see it as just done and dusted, and it's like, no, these are really key pieces that you need to consider that inform your lesson planning, inform how you deliver, how you work with students, and inform your teaching. So I say all that because when I first get them, one of the first scaffolded assignments I give them, which is not for a grade, it's a basic template. And it just says, "Pick your four key classes in Education, and I'll name them, and then, what did you learn? What have you learned in those classes? What are your essential learnings? And why are they important to you? And do you have any evidence from what you've done that you've done this, that you've learned these things? Then I ask them to create a short screencast that introduces me, to then talking about the class they took, the assignments, and then what they've personally taken away and what it means for their future practice. It's an introduction to me of what they think they've learned and what they, you know, come away with. But it also gets them take some artefacts and begin to talk about them in a way of future growth. That's really done in the fall semester early on.
Kristina Hoeppner:What do your students think about that screencast and you wanting them to make those connections to their previous learning?
David Hicks:Some of them are terrified because they actually don't know how to do the technology to start with. So I have a little guide on that and getting them started. But a lot of what I do there is, well,'during the time of COVID, we had to develop screencasts, and we had to create mini lectures and all this stuff for students. This activity of creating a screencast is something that you may very well be expected to do if you do any online ed(ucation) teaching. As teachers, this is something that you're going to be doing.' We have a number of assignments where you write a narrative, but you'll also provide a screencast. So you can then verbalise and talk through - because when you can talk through something and explain it, it really does connect, it sticks with you. I think they don't necessarily mind it, but it's just me saying 'it's part of your professional development because you're probably going to be expected to do this, or there's a good chance within your future job. Just enjoy it and enjoy the moment.' The screencasts are something that's a consistent thing through because in the end, they do a final screencast that they attach to their electronic portfolio that is a 15-minute presentation of their high points. So they've got the portfolio, and then on the front, it's 15 minutes of these are my key stories. These are the things you're going to see. These are a couple of the stories, and these are the artefacts that show who I am and the essence of my growth. So that comes back round.
Kristina Hoeppner:So you do also teach them digital literacy skills by learning different tools that they might need as teachers as well.
David Hicks:Funny thing really is that we've been doing portfolios so long that I was trying to think today of how we first started using and what we were using. What were the platforms we used? We used initially a lot of like WYSIWYGs, what you see is what you get. And then at one point, we spent a great deal of time playing with Dreamweaver, and they were kind of doing little mini coding. And then it suddenly always became more about the esthetics rather than the content. Then I went to using the WordPress blog and let them play with that and then we went to products that the university was using, and then they wanted us to use them. I didn't think they actually allowed for folio thinking. They were just collecting information and then talking about it a little bit. So I ditched that. We started then to - it is another scaffold - I said, "my concern is that a lot of you are suddenly stuck on the colour and a couple of pictures and trying to make it sexy. I want more content than, you know, the sexiness." We've started using Google Sites, but we built a template. We built a template for them that they can adjust and do certain things in, but the template takes off the load of them actually building something from ground up. I have a Google Sites template, and I also have a WordPress template that they can take on and use now. So that's another scaffold, in a sense, that they just not starting with nothing and having to build it. Teachers are meant to do reflections, and they have to write about the reflections, right about the growth weekly. But ours was based around them providing evidence immediately and identifying evidence that connected to specific standards, and they would talk about it each week, and then Sara or myself would respond back and give them feedback as they talked through their experiences. They were already using artefacts and trying to couple the artefacts to how they were doing in the field and what they would do next. Another thing that I started to do was I realised that often though, even though it's over a period of time, and we talk about collecting all your work, going through the process of collect, select, reflect, helping them have folders online, that's InTASC 1, InTASC 2, which are the standards, and starting to put materials in there, I often still found that when they started doing the portfolio, they would just start writing and making connections, and it was almost like I was seeing a first draft. It was not always as tight and as well thought out as possible. So I developed something called the electronic portfolio foundation document, which is basically just, you're going to do a draft in Word first, and you're gonna basically take the standards, pick some artefacts, and begin to tell me your stories of how you meet these standards. They are all around learning and learner development or the content knowledge. So they write a document, and then I give them feedback and nudges about what should be in there, what I like, what I don't like, how they could talk about it in different ways. It's almost like laying a basis for them to practice reflecting. That becomes quite a major part. I tell them afterwards, "That's just your draft. Now, any good draft, you take that and then you start to rework it, and you make it tighter and sharper, and you couple more of the artefacts together, and you tell more of the stories, and you can talk about why you did things, how you did things, and how it's going to change your practice." So they're given that structure of keep saying, how's it influenced your practice? Why did you do that? Can you explain it to me? Can you show me in the artefacts and refer back to the artefacts to show me exactly why you did this, how you've improved in certain ways over time? So tell me a story of your growth.
Kristina Hoeppner:How do the students take that document and put it into their electronic portfolio?
David Hicks:So with the document, they will already be linking to individual artefacts or put screenshots in. They can link directly to the folders that are online that they've set up. They can copy and paste sections. They can rewrite sections in the template itself. Then they just start to refill it out and repurpose, put in their images and make links as you go. There's a couple of other assignments I do. If it still feels a little text-heavy or there's images and then there's links, I went back to the idea of screencasts. I asked them to do three assignments because I realised that they really still struggle to talk about and reflect on how they do assessments. So I asked them to get three to four artefacts over time that where they've done assessments, and tell me their story of how they've learned and improved assessments. What are assessments for? How does it work? How have you grown, and how do you use assessments? And then they build a screencast with PowerPoint in the back, and they're talking through their growth with this evidence. So they have evidence, evidence, evidence, and that then becomes an artefact unto itself that they can put in. And then, I say, "Pick two or three other things, from motivation to content knowledge to working with diverse learners, and get three or four artefacts that can link directly to working with diverse learners, and then tell me the story. You've got a three-minute screencast that explains the artefacts" and then explains how they come together and why this shows that they can now have learned to work with diverse learners, and what this means in the future. In essence there, I'm nudging them in a way will create self-contained artefacts, self-contained stories that they can also add into their electronic portfolio. And then one of the final assignments is they can only do this at the very end. There's 10 standards, they're broken into four categories, learner and learner development is one, and then there'll be like three standards underneath. And so I have them then create another screencast where they look at their standards, and they look at their portfolio and all the work they've done, and they have to create an introduction screencast to those key standards. It's like, 'Hey, in this standard here is what I've got. These are the highlights. This is what I struggled with, and here are the key artefacts that you'll see that show my understanding of blah, blah, blah. And these are examples of how I've grown.' I keep pushing'explain what you're doing, why you did it.' Often it is text, there's images, there's links to artefacts, and then there's these screencasts that they've done that they also drop in, that really have them verbalising and talking about their work as they go. All that happens builds through the semester. Then I also set up just separate work sessions where the students come and we sit and they show me what they've got, and we make suggestions. I encourage them to work together in teams and look at each other's and peer review and what they like and what they've got. I often say,'Everybody's done similar assignments, but you've all had different experiences in the schools. You know, as you're reading somebody's experience, are they really telling you about their teaching practice and how they've grown and what does the evidence really match?' And so they sit together and offer people ideas and advice, as well as sometimes technical support when they're trying to position an image and they can't get it quite right. The scaffolds I've been putting in place over time, they've basically built into assignments, and then I give them time to meet with me as we go.
Kristina Hoeppner:David, what I really like is your approach to the reflection, which sounds like a double reflective cycle, that when they put the artefacts in, they already reflect on them. Why is that particular artefact or this group of artefacts really important for me to make a point, and then they also look at it from the lens of the teaching standards. So that's where then the second round of reflection comes in, abstracting it again from what they had already written before and now putting that standard lens on top and looking at it from that point of view. Your students create the portfolio at the end of their studies because you have them pretty much in their last year. Do some of them encounter portfolios already before then in their studies?
David Hicks:I do not think so. I may have had a couple who were in the master's programme who did stuff at the undergraduate level, but a lot of them, the idea is new, or this portfolio is a little bit bigger than a course portfolio. We've had them sometimes have a little cost portfolio in the past, but they've only got a few things in and this becomes all encompassing because it's about the growth, not just in my class, but everybody's classes, and the whole programme itself coming together and telling the story. While they may have had a little bit of a portfolio, or they've heard the term'portfolio', and they may have some experience, I would say that's minimal, and often this is the first portfolio that they've done.
Kristina Hoeppner:Do you sometimes then get the outcry from students, 'Oh, had I known that in my first year, I would have been able to already collect and reflect and learn all of those skills early on'?
David Hicks:Yes, definitely.
Kristina Hoeppner:Do you feel like there is work that can be done at Virginia Tech to support the students, either in their undergrad or earlier in their master's to get to the point of integrating portfolios more?
David Hicks:I do think the portfolios as a form of assessment themselves are very powerful. In a period now where we're actually talking about concerns with AI and worries about people cheating and things like that, I think portfolios as a form of assessment that requires students to reflect on their own growth and their own learnings and make sense of what they've done can become even more powerful. And then somebody is going to put a couple of essays in an AI, put their essays in and say, 'What did I learn?' And then they'll just copy that back. But I do think portfolios can offset some people's concerns with how AI may take away from the learning process.
Kristina Hoeppner:Especially with the screencasts work that your students are doing that it's not just the written word that you see, but you also see their facial expressions and how enthusiastic they talk about something, and therefore make it even more personal for them that they might also not be inclined to use an aid there. Besides the reflection, what aspect of the portfolio work do students often struggle with initially?
David Hicks:I think one of the big concerns is for them, they're worried if they're going to pass or fail because it is a capstone. They'll be fine because there's things built in. The thing that I still find the most frustrating for many students is we create these big lists of artefacts and experiences that they've done, and sometimes they don't remember what they've actually done in terms of artefacts and evidence. I've sat there going,'don't you remember this assignment from this other class? I know more about this other class than you do.' I want them to be more own their own connections, and we have to spend time helping them make the connection still, which is part of the scaffold in itself, but it's almost like an amnesia that they forget what good work they've done, then they struggle trying to pull together a couple of artefacts that they've not thought of. So it's that thinking and bringing coupling things together. The other thing is, sometimes I would like them to be more willing to look at small sections of, say, lesson plans, and take maybe their objectives and how they've grown over time to improve their objectives. Sometimes, I think that kind of fine tuning is what they still struggle with. I have to encourage them and nudge them to think about that more than I want them to. I want them to have a little bit more ownership, which goes back to if they had more experience for portfolios, and this process before it might make it easier. That's probably where I think the challenge is. I see more opportunities of where they could make the connections than they do. It takes quite a lot to get them going to start thinking in this way of making the connections and selecting stuff. I keep talking about tightly coupled narratives, and that takes time, and I think sometimes they find that initially frustrating, and it's only when they start to realise how much stuff they actually have, and they're asked to think about it.
Kristina Hoeppner:That's why I'm wondering whether introducing portfolios earlier on in their studies could then help. Because while your instructors, as you've said, try to make those connections between the individual classes, it still needs that actual prompting to say, 'Okay, now so make this connection,' and over time, then hopefully they get better at it, so that when you get them, it's not this new concept for them because they have already been practising that all along.
David Hicks:Yes.
Kristina Hoeppner:You've been using portfolios for over 20 years now, what have you learned throughout that time working with your students, in particular in teacher education?
David Hicks:The biggest thing I've learned is we talk about reflection a lot, and I think you have to understand what reflection is, and reflection is not a natural thing for many teacher candidates. It needs to be taught, and it needs to be modeled and it needs to be supported. I also realise that you've got to think about the end in mind of what you want the portfolio to be, a vision that you have to clearly communicate to your students, for them to see. I also don't want them to copy last year's portfolios. Now, I do let them look at some from last year or the year before to get a feel, but I often say, 'And yours will be better.' I've learned over time that the portfolio design process needs to be a sequence of assignments, the kind of prompts we use, the examples we show, and then the tone I set about it's a celebration of your journey to the other side of the desk. Something that becomes really important, and it shapes then how they engage with the portfolios itself. It's not purely an assessment tool, it is, but it's a pedagogical space where they can wrestle with their growth, their values, and begin to see themselves as being and I often talk about 'You actually sound like real teachers when you write that, and when you say that, you actually sound like you know what you're talking about, that's pretty cool.' And that's what it's meant to be. It's meant to be this mirror looking back at what they can say and a map of where they're heading. But to do that, you've got to put things in place.
Kristina Hoeppner:The exemplars that you're talking about, what do they look like?
David Hicks:So what I typically share with the students now, we have a frequently asked questions of what it looks like and examples of what reflection could do. I take two or three different portfolios from over time, and they do spend time going in to analyse what they look like. So what do their reflections look like? How did the screencast get organised? How did they pull it together? So they've got these prompts to explore the portfolio. Then I ask them, which ones are the better ones for you? Which ones make sense? Because I don't give them just the good ones. I also think have not kind of hit the mark as well as they should. And I say, 'Where are you in this and what are you going to borrow? What does reflection look like here? What does reflection look like there? How they couple the information together? Can you explain to me which ones you think I think are best?'
Kristina Hoeppner:Which is wonderful because they are teacher education students, so that also teaches them what they will need in their future career.
David Hicks:I always say, 'I really don't need looking at them. I don't need too much time with them because you're going to do it better. But I do want you looking at specific pieces and telling me what you like about it and what makes sense, and does this fit for exemplary reflection, and are they using their artefacts as well as they should to tell you that story?'
Kristina Hoeppner:So now that we have looked back, what is on your map for the future of your portfolio journey with your students?
David Hicks:Things change a lot, and they continue to change. For me at the moment, it is about stabilising the process that we have, stabilising the use of the templates, and then I started bringing back students to talk about their experiences and their portfolios - alumni - and talk about what they got out and how to set it up there. And I'm going to probably do a little bit more of that. Ideally, I'd like them to still use the portfolios, but they don't, but they come back and talk about how it's got them to think about where they are now before they move on. That's somewhere I want to continue to get my alumni to come back and talk about that more and be more specific about their own work with portfolios. I think we are also moving in Virginia, moving away from multiple choice assessments and getting students to recognise how portfolios can also be used again in classrooms, in history classrooms and things like that, and have that as a model.
Kristina Hoeppner:With your alumni that are coming back to class to talk about their portfolio experience, they now have the privilege of hindsight. Has there been any big revelation that stuck in your mind of what one or two of the students have said, why the portfolio did help them or how it helped them in their career?
David Hicks:What is nice is sometimes they say to the students, 'Listen to David, trust him. It is a celebration. Trust him.' That helps. What they've said, again, is the idea that it did allow them to talk like a teacher, and the very fact that they've also shared it on their job interviews and shared versions of it with principals when they've gone for interviews, and they've liked what they've seen, it makes them feel more professional. It made them ready to enter the profession. It made them be able to talk like a professional, and it made them feel like they were welcomed as professionals when they were showing them as part as job interviews. It's not just to get a job, but it really did show that it connects to the profession, and it was well received. That story of coming back feels good. They scare them a little bit when they say, 'Well, that electronic portfolio foundation document can get really, really long,' and I'm like, 'Yeah, but it's you talking about yourselves, how cool you are, and where you learned, and where you fell down a bit, and what you can do about it differently.' Yeah, they do talk about how that is a big thing for them.
Kristina Hoeppner:That's really fantastic to see that what starts out as an assessment for them to finish their capstone course, get that pass, actually does transition into their career and helps them also later on. Therefore, what you're trying to achieve and trying to show them from the start that it's not just an assessment, but it gets you onto your lifelong learning journey or becoming that reflective practitioner, things you should be doing as teachers anyway, they realise just a bit later themselves. Now to our last three questions, David, to our quick answer round. Which words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work?
David Hicks:Tightly-coupled, evidence-based narrative; reflection on and in practice; and a celebration of your journey to the other side of the desk.
Kristina Hoeppner:Awesome. What last tip do you want to share with learning designers and instructors for creating portfolio activities for their learners?
David Hicks:For me, it's you get what you ask for. So you've got to be very specific. So design backwards with what you ultimately want. What's your goal? If you want them to engage in deep reflection, you need to scaffold it and not just say,'Do deep reflection,' but you need to have touch points, examples, feedback, and space for iteration.
Kristina Hoeppner:What advice do you have for portfolio authors, for your students?
David Hicks:Don't just show. It's not a show and tell. It's not a scrapbook. It's about explaining why something mattered to you, why it matters, and how it changed you. Your portfolio is not purely about proving your competence, but it's telling the story of your growth and your ongoing journey to the other side of the desk, and you do it with tightly-coupled evidence. Have a positive mindset, but you can still talk about difficulties, but what you're going to do differently in the future as well, but it's always with a positive future mindset to be a teacher and explaining and being aware of your work and explaining why you did things.
Kristina Hoeppner:Thank you so much for tying that bow back and bringing us back to the folio thinking of your ePortfolio development framework that includes collect, select, reflect, and connect, so that we see that it is about the journey of each student. It is personal to them. Yes, it's an assessment, but it actually helps them also in many other ways beyond that, and then hopefully they will realise that you are preparing them for their career later on. Thank you so much for the chat today, David.
David Hicks:Thank you very much, Kristina.
Kristina Hoeppner:Now over to you. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Professor Dr David Hicks. Head to our website, podcast.mahara.org, where you can find resources and the transcript for this episode. Our next episode of 'Create. Share. Engage. Portfolios for learning and more' will air in two weeks. I hope you will listen again and tell a colleague about our podcast so they can subscribe. Until then, create share, and engage.