Child and Family Studies

Professional Portfolio

Guidelines

2014-15

Table of Contents

Introduction3

CFS Program Learning Outcomes and Objectives4

Creating and Completing a Portfolio5

Documentation Template Questions and Instructions6

Components of a Portfolio9

Policy on Continuous Progress10

Appendix

Rubric11

Working Review Sheet13

Theoretical Knowledge14

PSU Campus-Wide Learning Outcomes22

How to Read an Academic Article23

Final Rubric24

Glossary and Reference25

Comparative Writing Styles27

Welcome to the CFS Professional Portfolio Process

As a newly admitted CFS student, please know that you were selected to prepare for the honored professional positions of working with children, youth, and their families. While mainstream society doesn’t always honor these positions, work done on behalf of children, youth, and families should be highly esteemed! This work is laced with moral and ethical decisions that can significantly influence the lives of our clients and students, as well as families and the greater community. As professionals, you will make decisions that have the potential to affect others’ lives significantly. Working with children and families involves a great deal more than just wanting to help others have a better life. Therefore, to assume such a professional role involves a great deal of time, study, and personal reflection.

CFS Faculty and staff have created the admissions and educational process to ensure that all our graduates are prepared for their professional roles. One important aspect of this preparation is the creationof an integrated Professional Portfolio. All students in the CFS Program create a Professional Portfolio to document their achievement of the program learning outcomes and objectives.

In terms of grading, we do our best to return material to you just as soon as we can. For the portfolio classes in particular, where prompt feedback is so critical, you can expect a turnaround time between one and two weeks for your documentations.

Many students don’t know, however, that at a university like PSU, teaching and advising students constitute just one part of faculty members’ jobs. Most of your faculty are also held accountable for maintaining productive and active research or publication agendas and participating in a wide range of service activities in the program, the college and university, and the larger community. Sometimes, these other responsibilities conflict with our ability to be immediately present or responsive to you – so we thank you for your patience. In concrete terms, this means it’s generally safe to assume you’ll receive responses to emails within a few days, but it’s not reasonable to expect immediate responses or replies over the weekend or on University breaks.

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What is the Professional Portfolio?

The CFS Professional Portfolio serves several functions. Most obviously, it demonstrates how you as a student articulate the links between what you’ve done in your CFS coursework (learning experiences), what you’ve learned in terms of knowledge from our related fields (theoretical knowledge), and the outcomes we hope you achieve by the time you complete the program (CFS Learning Outcomes). The portfolio will walk you through a set of structured exercises and teach you a very specific style of professional writing to help you articulate how you’ve met our program’s outcomes and demonstrate your ability to think, argue, and write like a professional.

We know the portfolio process is not always fun. It is rigorous and demanding. It will demand that you master a new and sometimes artificial-feeling writing style. It will challenge you. But we also know that all students are capable of finishing this project. We are here to help you. And the collected wisdom from several generations of CFS alums tells us that in the end, it’s all worthwhile.

Learning Outcomes and Portfolio Objectives

The CFS Professional Portfolio demonstrates your ability to connect coursework, theoretical knowledge, and critical reflection to your achievement of three of our program’s learning outcomes. These outcomes are central to the portfolio process:

Preamble: Child and Family Studies students will be able to access, analyze, apply, and articulate theoretical knowledge to make professional decisions that improve the lives of children, youth, and families as they:

  1. Describe the development, roles, and interaction patterns of children, youth, and families within their social systems;
  2. Identify dimensions of diversity in children, youth, and families and recognize oppressive forces that hinder their positive development;
  3. Demonstrate professional standards of ethical conduct; and
  4. Assume the role of change agents regarding issues, policies, & community needs that affect children, youth, and their families.

In addition, the portfolio has the following specific objectives:

  • Think critically about the everyday realities of children, youth, and families;
  • Identify and explain theoretical knowledge that is applicable for specific professional settings;
  • Apply that theoretical knowledge to their work in a professional/practical setting;
  • Write appropriately for professional settings; and
  • Personally reflect upon their life experiences and professional practice

Creating and Completing Your Professional Portfolio

The CFS portfolio is a long process. It begins in CFS 494 (Professionalism: Knowledge), continues through CFS 495 (Professionalism: Identity), and culminates in CFS 496 (Professionalism: Integration). All CFS students take CFS 494 during their first term in the program. We recommend that students register for CFS 495 immediately upon completion of CFS 494 and take CFS 496 the term in which they hope to graduate.

In each course, you will complete a formal documentation of how your CFS coursework facilitated the achievement of one CFS Learning Outcome (LO). To do this, you will learn a new style of professional writing, respond to specific template questions geared toward deepening your critical thinking and reflection on the LO you are documenting, and use a structured rubric to assess your progress. The final portfolio will be assembled in CFS 496 and includes your documentations of three CFS LOs as well as a resume and final reflection.

Mastery-Based Learning

The CFS Professional Portfolio is a mastery-based document. This means that you are invited to submit as many drafts of each documentation as you’d like in order to earn the grade you hope to have. Your faculty will review each submission and offer concrete feedback for improvement for the duration of the term. In a 10-week term, as long as you stay on top of the documentation, it is likely you could submit multiple drafts along the way to your final score. Note that it is your responsibility to make sure you have provided enough time to submit revisions, receive feedback, and revise the documentation.

Grading the Portfolio

As you work on the documentations for each CFS LO, your work will be assessed using a rubric (a copy of the rubric can be found in Appendix A). The rubric corresponds to the eight template questions you will answer for each documentation, and the columns on the rubric demonstrate what successful responses to those questions entail.

Your instructor will help you learn to use the rubric as a guide in formulating your responses to the template questions. Each time you submit a draft of your documentation, your instructor will offer comments in the text and indicate your progress and points earned on the rubric; this will help you see immediately where you can strengthen the response to any given template question.

Each time your documentation is reviewed, the template questions that did not achieve full points on the rubric will be all that is re-reviewed. In other words, parts of the documentation that you have already mastered will not be reviewed again.

In order to receive a passing grade for CFS 494, 495, and 496, you will need to have a final score of 73/100 or better on your completed documentation (all template questions must be answered) and have satisfactorily completed any supplemental assignments or activities in the course. CFS 494 will be graded Pass/No Pass; in order to earn a passing grade, the conditions above must be met. CFS 495 and 496 will result in a letter grade corresponding with the highest score on the documentation for that class at the end of the term.

Submitting Your Documentations

When submitting all or a portion of your documentation, please include the following documents:

  • The current revision (the draft you’d like to have graded);
  • The most recent prior revision (so faculty can see their previous feedback);
  • The rubric for this documentation; and
  • The “Portfolio Working Review” sheet (see Appendix B). This sheet is to be used as a cover sheet any timeyou hand in any part of a documentation. You will only need one review sheet throughout your work on the Portfolio. Please fill in the squares about the course and the learning experience you are using for each Learning Outcome documentation. The instructor will insert the date, your current score, and initials. When you have revised your documentation to your satisfaction, you will sign off in the far right-hand column. The instructor for each LO will also sign off.

The Documentation Itself

Professional writing in our fields requires a very specific style. Different from the kind of academic writing you may be accustomed to submitting for classes, professional writing in the helping professions is often much more focused, targeted toward specific prompts or questions, and less personal. Much of the time – whether writing a report for the court, an IEP, a case note for a client file, or a grant application – you will be asked to respond individually to specific questions in a template. The CFS Professional Portfolio offers you practice writing in this kind of setting.

In each documentation, you will select a learning experience that you will then use as the basis for your responses to eight focused template questions. You should think of the documentation as eight individual responses, not a paper like you might submit for other any other class. Just like when you write in your professional practice, you cannot assume that the person who reads template question six also read number three; therefore, your response to each question needs to be self-contained and capable of standing on its own. This sometimes makes the writing feel very repetitive; you’ll be using the same phrasing over and over throughout the documentation (we call this Internal Logical Consistency; you’ll hear more about that in class).

Template Questions

Each CFS Professional Portfolio documentation will consist of your responses to the following eight questions:

1.What Child and Family Studies Learning Outcome is the focus of this documentation?

2.What type of learning experience did you complete that facilitated your accomplishment of this CFS Learning Outcome?

3.Describe what you did in the learning experience.

4.What theoretical knowledge did you use in this learning experience?

5.How did you or would you like to apply this theoretical knowledge to your professional practice?

6.What did you learn that is related to the selected CFS Program Learning Outcome, and how did this learning experience help you achieve the LO?

7.What PSU Campus-Wide Learning Outcomes were involved in this learning experience?

8.What are your reflections about how this learning experience and/or CFS Program Learning Outcomes documentation contributes to your professional development and perspective?

General Guidance for Answering the Template Questions

As you go through your documentation, keep in mind these broad instructions:

  • Always answer the template question specifically and exactly; when writing to a template and in professional contexts, do not paraphrase the questions or the template. Your reader needs clear introductions and conclusions that frame your text precisely.
  • Check what you have written for each documentation section against the assessment rubric.
  • Each documentation should focus on one CFS Learning Outcome. While it is quite possible that any learning experience could address more than one CFS LO, you should only use one learning experience for each of the first three CFS LOs.
  • Each documentation needs to have a reference list at the end to cite the theoretical knowledge that you will write about in template questions number four.

Although you will get additional guidance from your instructor about how to answer the eight template questions, we offer broad instructions for each question below:

  1. What Child and Family Studies Learning Outcome is the focus of this documentation?

First, answer the template question specifically. To answer it, use a full sentence written with correct grammar. Then, write a sentence that will inform the reader what the LO says. You must include the preamble before you write out the actual LO.

  1. What type of learning experience did you complete that facilitated your accomplishment of this CFS Learning Outcome?

The learning experience you select can be from any of courses you have taken toward your major (you may not include experiences from a course taken in fulfillment of your UNST or BA/BS requirements). The learning experience you use for LO #1 is the Creation and Use of Knowledge.Then create a sentence that states the course name and number. Examples of learning experiences you might select are:

Library research, reflection, response, or other class papers

Specific practicum experiences

Specific aspects of a community-based learning experience

Group projects

Field trips

Action projects

Special projects with children and/or families.

Remember, you cannot consider the entire class to be the learning experience. The answer to this question can be very brief. The course information and the type of learning experience, written in a full sentence, is all that is needed.

  1. Describe what you did in the learning experience:

Describe your learning experience step-by-step. This section should be much more specific than template question number two. You should explain every aspect of the learning experience you completed. You also need to cite the theoretical knowledge you used in your learning experience, using APA style for citation and formatting. Briefly explain how this learning experience helped you achieve the CFS Program Learning Outcome. Integrate some of the LO language into your sentence.

  1. What theoretical knowledge (concepts, conceptual frameworks, research findings, or theories) did you use within this learning experience?

You need to identify the theoretical knowledge that was the basis for the learning experience that you completed. Please refer to pages 16-23 that describe the different kinds of theoretical knowledge. Briefly, theoretical knowledge is created when practitioners, scholars, or researchers write about their experiences in a way that adheres to professional standards, is connected to other published studies or experiences (forms of received knowledge), and is most often peer-reviewed prior to publication. The types of theoretical knowledge we will consider for the purposes of the portfolio are theories, concepts, conceptual frameworks/models/paradigms, or research findings (see Appendix C for more detail about these). As you explain the theoretical knowledge that has been the basis for the learning experience or is embedded in the learning experience, you will need to cite the knowledge in your written text. Your explanation of the theoretical knowledge should include a definition, and an in-depth description or explanation. You also need to explain how the theoretical knowledge was related to the learning experience as well as the CFS LO. Don’t forget to add a reference list at the end of the documentation.

  1. How did or would you like to apply this knowledge to your professional practice?

In this section, you should describe how you have applied the theoretical knowledge. If you haven’t used the knowledge yet, you can explain how you think you would use it in your professional role. Be specific about what professional role you expect to have. You need to include an application for the specifics of the theoretical knowledge that you include in template question number four. Your depth of understanding will be reflected in your application of this knowledge. One of the criteria of a professional is that she/he knows how to apply or use theoretical knowledge in practical situations. You also need to briefly explain how your application of the knowledge relates to your achievement of the CFS Program Learning Outcome you are documenting.

  1. What did you learn that is related to the selected CFS Program Learning Outcome and how did this learning experience help you achieve the Child and Family Studies Program LO?

Specifically describe what you learned while you were completing the learning experience. Then create a statement of achievement that states that by completing the learning experience and learning all the things you did, you have shown that you can/have accomplished the Learning Outcome. In other words, you need to include a clear statement of your achievement of the CFS Program Learning Outcome.