Dr Bob Reuter is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education and Social Work at University of Luxembourg in Luxembourg where he has taught courses relating to educational psychology, educational technology, and educational research, in particular in the Bachelor en Sciences de l'Éducation / Bachelor of Science in Education (BScE) since 2004.
Bob is a technology enthusiast and explores how all technology, not just educational technology can benefit students in their learning. He uses a social constructivist approach to teaching and learning for which he thinks portfolios are very well suited.
In this episode, he talks about the two different types of portfolios the future school teachers of Letzebuerg encounter during their studies and how they help in the learning process.
Connect with Bob
Resources
Click through to the episode notes for the transcript.
Subscribe to the monthly newsletter about Mahara and portfolios.
Production information
Production: Catalyst IT
Host: Kristina Hoeppner
Artwork: Evonne Cheung
Music: The Mahara tune by Josh Woodward
Dr Bob Reuter is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education and Social Work at University of Luxembourg in Luxembourg where he has taught courses relating to educational psychology, educational technology, and educational research, in particular in the Bachelor en Sciences de l'Éducation / Bachelor of Science in Education (BScE) since 2004.
Bob is a technology enthusiast and explores how all technology, not just educational technology can benefit students in their learning. He uses a social constructivist approach to teaching and learning for which he thinks portfolios are very well suited.
In this episode, he talks about the two different types of portfolios the future school teachers of Letzebuerg encounter during their studies and how they help in the learning process.
Connect with Bob
Resources
Click through to the episode notes for the transcript.
Subscribe to the monthly newsletter about Mahara and portfolios.
Production information
Production: Catalyst IT
Host: Kristina Hoeppner
Artwork: Evonne Cheung
Music: The Mahara tune by Josh Woodward
Kristina Hoeppner 0:05
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.
Kristina Hoeppner 0:29
I'm stoked to be talking with Dr Bob Reuter today because it's like taking a trip down memory lane to my days op der Uni Letzebuerg, University of Luxembourg, where I started with Mahara in 2008. Bob is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education and Social Work and to teaches a variety of courses in the Bachelor en Sciences de l'Éducation relating to educational psychology, educational technology, and educational research. He is also the Vice-Head of the Institute for Teaching and Learning.
Kristina Hoeppner 1:04
Gudden Owend, good evening, Bob, and merci for taking the time to chat today.
Bob Reuter 1:10
Gudden Owend, Kristina.
Kristina Hoeppner 1:12
I look forward to catching up with you on what's been happening over the last 13 years in regards to portfolios in the BScE. You are working at the intersection of psychology, education, and also educational technology. Can you tell us more about that?
Bob Reuter 1:29
My background is in Cognitive Psychology. I did have also certain courses on Educational Sciences back in the days. When I started to work at University of Luxembourg in 2004, to be precise, I was actually doing a needs analysis for an educational programme that was to be developed for language learning. I came in touch with educational technology, and I had a keen interest in anything that was computers, like from my adolescence. And then when I was asked to give courses at the University of Luxembourg, it was basically to teach future teacher students how to use the classical authoring tools like Word or PowerPoint and some Excel, but we quickly then switched over to discussing and presenting more the strategic uses of ICT tools in an educational setting where teachers use it in the classroom, or students use it in the classroom.
Kristina Hoeppner 2:25
What are then currently actually your favourite technology tools?
Bob Reuter 2:30
To be honest, it's mostly these tools that are not necessarily designed for education, but that are productivity tools. Let's say these tools that learners of all ages can use to get information, to communicate with others, to collaborate at a distance, but also in real life in the same setting, and also to produce digital artefacts or digital resources with which they show what they have found out in their research process, and then last but not least, all these tools that we can use to publish what we are passionate about.
Bob Reuter 3:05
It's often not tools that are special learning apps because these learning apps often have a very peculiar theory of learning that they implement, which is based on an objectivist theory of knowledge and learning where the student receives some preconceived knowledge that is, so to say objectively true and falls from the sky, basically, while the other tools allow you to have a more constructivist approach to learning and teaching.
Kristina Hoeppner 3:32
So you take the tools, very generic tools, and then see how you can apply them for learning and teaching and how you can make them work for you and your specific context.
Bob Reuter 3:45
Yes, that's actually a decision that we took for a third year course in the Bachelor in Educational Sciences where our students are supposed to design educational technology scenarios. And we said, 'We don't want you to use any tool that allows for a directed instruction technology integration strategy.' So, anything that's a drill and practice tool or anything that's an educational explanatory video, for instance, or multimedia or hypermedia tool for that purpose. We quickly discovered that the tools that the students were using were audio recorders, were video recorders, were word processing tools, or slideshow tools because they had their students with whom they implemented these scenarios discover stuff in the real world and use then the digital tools to present their knowledge to an audience in the classroom or to parents or to the entire school.
Kristina Hoeppner 4:43
Fascinating. And so why is the social constructivism that is underpinning the Bachelor in Educational Sciences at the University of Luxembourg so important to the study programme?
Bob Reuter 4:54
Well, I think there are two answers. One is based on who teaches and who has been teaching in the study programme, and a lot of the people that have been teaching over the last nearly 20 years are convinced by constructivist or social constructivist teaching practices. But I also think that the more scientific answer is that most of us are convinced [laughs] that this is the state of the art theory and allows us to explain most learning or most parts of the learning process rather than a behaviouristic view, which really narrowly defines what learning is, and then also narrowly would define what your teaching practice would be.
Kristina Hoeppner 5:39
With the study programme, the students work quite a bit in projects and explore things on their own and work with very much authentic assessment types. When we talked in the past, and back in the day, you had published books with your students on Lev Vygotsky...
Bob Reuter 5:56
Yes.
Kristina Hoeppner 5:56
Can you tell us a little bit about that experience with the students? Because that is very different from a regular university lecture task or writing an essay and then just handing that in.
Bob Reuter 6:09
Yeah, I think it's an extension of what you might see in other contexts. So it's a bit like students ask themselves a question or get a question by the lecturer, and then they try to develop an answer to that question. In this case, we decided together, basically, I decided [laughs] and asked the study programme director back in the days if that was okay, and he said, "Yes." But yeah, we decided to not just produce something that was authentic, but also to make it available to a potential authentic audience of teachers or other researchers. And the product in itself after it's produced is not that important. But without his product, being at the end of the process, I think students wouldn't take the processes seriously because they know that there is something at stake. It will be visible what they will produce. So they are more invested, they're more engaged to create something that has value for others.
Kristina Hoeppner 7:05
So the students value the product, whereas you were valuing the process.
Bob Reuter 7:10
Yes, but I'm pretty aware that without the product and without the physicality in one sense or the other of this product, the process would probably be very different.
Kristina Hoeppner 7:21
In portfolio work, we also oftentimes talk about the process and the product. The BScE at uni.lu can look back at quite a long history of working with portfolios. Why is that?
Bob Reuter 7:34
I think it's because portfolio work or documenting and reflecting your own learning process was already an established practice before the establishment of University of Luxembourg at the previous institution that was doing initial teacher training. So there was already this tradition of having students think about their own learning, document what they did, how they did it, why they did. And let's say there are now currently over the last 20 years, there were two types of portfolio works that developed.
Bob Reuter 8:05
So one is really this professional development central portfolio, which has been there since 2004, 2005, and was there when you were there in 2008, where students really use this, I would call it a 'container' because it can be a box where they collect anything that's related to who they are becoming as a future teacher. This is the crossroad where all other experiences that they have in lectures and seminars, but also in the internship classes or outside of formal training, anything that they think is useful to show and to reflect upon who they are becoming as a future teacher.
Bob Reuter 8:46
And then there are individual courses like the course that I co-teach, which is called 'Education in the digital age', where we also use a portfolio approach, but it's quite a different approach because it's more focused, it's more bound to really this course. We have 10 sessions with 10 topics and the students are supposed to use the structure that we give them, which is the titles of these 10 sessions basically, of these 10 seminars, and then they need to show that they know something about this topic, and that they have understood the main important concepts or theories or taxonomies that are part of these topics.
Kristina Hoeppner 9:23
How do you introduce the portfolio to the students in that very specific context because it is different from the general portfolio that they are supposed to keep in the study programme?
Bob Reuter 9:35
It's in that sense a bit a different approach because the general teacher development portfolio gives them normally a lot of freedom. Well, there is also now certain structure of things that they are supposed to do or that they are invited to do. But for our specific course it's in that sense much more guided, much more structured. Still the students struggle with the definition of the task, which is 'Your task is to show that you have understood what this topic is about.' So we don't dictate them, and they are quite lost when you don't dictate because we asked him to think about the subject in advance to the seminar, then in the seminar, we have collaborative knowledge construction tasks, a variety of types, and then afterwards, individually, they need to create these artefacts and reflections in their portfolio to show us that they have really understood what this is about. Sometimes it's also about application: that they need to design a first lesson plan for media and information literacy, for instance, which is going beyond the mere understanding of what media and information literacy is.
Kristina Hoeppner 10:42
How do the students engage with their portfolio in this context? Is it that they alone and you as a lecturer see the portfolio? Or do they also bring in other students for feedback?
Bob Reuter 10:54
It's actually a good question, because I don't know that in the sense that, let's say, the portfolio work is somehow running behind the scenes. We generally, in that course, don't necessarily give concrete feedback on their portfolio artefacts over the semester; not because we don't want to, but because we have so many students that in order to be fair and just to all students, we will probably have to spend a lot of time reading and commenting.
Bob Reuter 11:25
And that's partially why we decided to have an ePortfolio solution, which is a centralised portfolio solution provided by the university to our students, instead of what we had before, which was 'use whatever tool you have, you can do something offline in Word, in a folder, or in PowerPoint or whatever you want,' and then they hand it in at the end of the semester. So currently, we have a solution that would technically allow us to be more interactive, to be more, yeah, scaffolding over the semester, but we just don't have the time, unfortunately.
Bob Reuter 11:56
We still compare the performance of our students in the portfolio work to what they did, at the end of the semester in a written exam. Technically, we would have results of their learning process quicker, but we unfortunately, can't manage to do that really systematically. Which is a pity.
Kristina Hoeppner 12:15
Maybe that is a research project in the making at some point: That there is the portfolios of the students while they are not receiving direct feedback from you as the lecturers and but that one still looks at, well, how does it impact their final results in the course?
Bob Reuter 12:30
Yeah, to a certain extent, I also think that students have a variety of strategies. Some of the students were really systematically, each week do the preparation work with a seminar where they are supposed to read, watch, listen to certain existing responses about certain topics, that they can stand on the shoulders of their ancestors, so to say, that they don't just come with their prior knowledge, which sometimes is very naive prior knowledge, but so that they come with an informed view on the topic, and then in the course, we tried to have them confront these views that they bring to the table so that they get a deeper understanding or deeper construct of the concept of the theories at play. And then they write it up locally on their laptop, for instance. And then at the end of the semester, they sit down and they use the preparation works to bring it all into the online ePortfolio tool, and they might struggle because that's a lot to do [laughs], and in a short period of time; others probably do it more systematically over the semester.
Kristina Hoeppner 13:34
So in your course then what is the role of the tutor or lecturer in regards to the portfolio?
Bob Reuter 13:41
Well, we basically show them how this tool works, but we also try not to show them too much. Because part of what it means to be a learner in the digital age is to be playful and to try things out and to read the help section of these tools because they are there and somebody also produced tutorials for Mahara, for instance, like you did. So we also try to have them be independent of us, which is not always obvious because there is a wide variety of prior competencies when it comes to using a diversity of ICT tools for productivity. Then at the end, we use the traces in the portfolio, the artefacts and the reflections that they submit, to evaluate in how far we are convinced. Their main task is to convince us that they have worked on these subjects enough. The typical question also that we get is 'How much do I need to produce for a certain topic?' And that's really the impossible question because it's not a question of quantity. But of course, if you only say 'two sentences,' then it's hard to be convincing in two sentences. If you say like a lot and a lot and a lot and a lot you also don't show that you have really understood what's the essence of a subject.
Kristina Hoeppner 15:01
That fine line between scaffolding and letting them to their own thing.
Bob Reuter 15:07
Yeah, and to be honest, as an anecdote, we have now one student in the second semester, who asked me, "When should I stop producing stuff for my portfolio?" Because he's so interested, he's so keen on reading more and more and more. And of course, I think that's also our role to say, 'Okay, maybe it's okay for you to go beyond what are our minimum requirements because it's your passion.' And because I think finding your passion for a topic is something that you will be able to build upon in future semesters in future years or in a master programme, for instance, or in his practice. I wouldn't want to constrain him to a certain number of pages. But on the other hand, he also needs to learn how to manage his time because there are other courses for which he needs to study or to produce semester works.
Kristina Hoeppner 15:55
Do you have your students already in the first year or would they have been introduced to the other portfolio before they come to your course?
Bob Reuter 16:04
Actually, in the first semester, they have an introduction to the professional development portfolio, which they do now also link to the internships. So in terms of grading or passing this module, it's both, so they need to have a portfolio that shows what they have learned over the semester in all walks of life so to say, and in the internship, so their performance in classrooms. Then in the second semester, we do have this course where we introduce this digital portfolio because the generalist portfolio for professional development reflection can be something that they do physically. So it can be a treasure box or it can be anything that they want to do as a physical artefact. It can also be a mixed thing that has digital parts with QR codes that they print out and then are able to show to the tutor at the presentation session.
Kristina Hoeppner 16:56
What is the presentation session about because I don't remember having had that back in the day?
Bob Reuter 17:01
Well, there is actually a team of portfolio tutors that follow the students. The students are relatively free to do whatever they think fulfils the requirements [laughs] of that professional development portfolio, where the main objective is less to be able to show what you have learned and that you have learned, but to show that you have reflected, that you have documented, that you have reflected upon what does it mean to become a teacher. Then at the end of the semester, there is this exam session, well 'exam' in inverted commas because they need to be able to show that this is their portfolio basically. I think that the basic objective of that exam session is that tutors who then afterwards evaluate, and they evaluate currently as pass or fail, that they can be sure that this is this students portfolio and not somebody else's. Then it's a more free discussion about 'What have you learned this semester? And what are the things you struggle with? What are the things that you really love?'
Kristina Hoeppner 18:02
So the students do that every semester?
Bob Reuter 18:05
They do that every semester, even for the mobility semester where they are abroad for one semester. So they have a special mobility tutor who then sees them, and often this is now via videoconferencing [laughs], sees them when they come back from the mobility semester so that they can report on how this experience at a foreign university was, what they learned, what they liked, what they struggled with.
Kristina Hoeppner 18:31
How is the continuity of the portfolio, then looked at when the students work on it every single semester, they have tutors at the end that they talk to about their portfolio, do those tutors change over time?
Bob Reuter 18:45
Yeah. There is a team of people now, a dedicated team of people. It is no longer like it was a few years ago where the internship tutor was also the portfolio tutor. So this was now decoupled and they are now a smaller team of tutors who kind of share a vision about what it means to do a good portfolio, to show or to reflect your professional development. Tutors might come back, but it's not necessarily systematic that they have the same tutor over the eight semesters.
Kristina Hoeppner 19:13
Bob, what do you think is currently your biggest challenge with your portfolio work with the students?
Bob Reuter 19:19
I cannot really speak for the general portfolio because I have not really been involved in that practice. In the 'Education in the digital age' course, I'm pretty happy with having a portfolio approach because with that we can really implement an approach to knowledge where it becomes clear that knowledge is constructed. It doesn't fall from the sky. It's not dictated, you're not supposed to just reproduce. You are supposed to know what other people have developed, but then make it your own, show what this means for you as a student.
Bob Reuter 19:53
What I still struggle with is evaluation; having clear criteria on how to grade it because, in the end, we need to grade it. I really think that the students are really doing a lot, like a lot. And they produce a lot in terms of text, some of them produce audio, some of them produce video. So some of them sit in front of a webcam and tell us what they have learned over the semester for these 10 topics.
Bob Reuter 20:19
We had one student who did a video that had 90 minutes. It was one video. Of course, she didn't record it in one session, but she clearly had thought about all these things and was able to tell it in Luxembourgish, which is also maybe peculiar in the sense that all the technical terms, of course, are often in English or German, sometimes in French, but seeing her being able to tell all this knowledge about digitalisation, new skill requirements in teachers, students, and then all the different tools and different ways of using ICT in the classroom up to digital game based learning – because we had the final session on that – and she was really able to explain what all these means for her in her own voice. And that was great.
Bob Reuter 21:07
But for us as tutors, as evaluators, 90 minutes of video [laughs] is, of course, something that's much harder to read in a cross diagonal way compared to when you have text, when you can relatively easily see if this is convincing, especially when you have more and more students. And in the next years, we're supposed to double the number of graduates in our study programme. So then it might become difficult to evaluate and to evaluate then by reading everything, and we might have to resort to another strategy, which is students still need to do portfolio work in the sense that they need to collect artefacts of what they have done, what they have found, what they have constructed, and show that they have reflected it. But maybe we'll have in the end something like a 10-minute video where they present all this. Then we just grade these 10-minute videos. We also discovered that videos where they have to explain and position themselves, is much more authentic than essays that they write. Now with artificial intelligence that can write for you, it's becoming even more difficult to really know that this is their thinking.
Kristina Hoeppner 22:19
How many students do you then have every semester?
Bob Reuter 22:22
I think last year, we had 60 students in the third year, now I think we have 80 students, and next year, we will have something like 100, and then we're supposed to go up to, yeah, 200 students because the schools need more trained teachers. And hopefully we will get more teaching resources with that push to graduate more people that we can also hire more people.
Kristina Hoeppner 22:48
We've talked a little bit about your challenges, but where do you see the opportunities for portfolios in the coming years? You did mention AI a bit, so I wonder if that has also big impact.
Bob Reuter 22:59
One possibility would of course be if AI could support us in evaluating, in analysing basically saying, 'Okay, this student has a portfolio that nicely explains all the different concepts.' I'm not totally convinced that artificial intelligence, as we currently have it, will be able to do that because they are not knowledge models. They are for most parts, visual arts models or language models, and you can fool language models [laughs] basically into hallucinating anything that sounds like human language, but has nothing to do with our knowledge of the real world outside of language, even though a lot of knowledge is embedded in language, but not everything that is embedded in language is knowledge about the world.
Bob Reuter 23:42
The other opportunity, really that I see, and this is still a convincing argument to do portfolio work for this foundational course is because later on, we have another course where they do an educational technology project where they are supposed to develop meaningful, strategic, ideally successful educational technology practices, and they need to use all the theoretical foundations that we laid down in the first year. With the portfolio, now they have no good excuse to say 'I don't remember.' We can just say, 'It was our course, you should have something in your portfolio.' And then it's like, 'Oh, yes, I know where to find it.' And I think learning and memorising and constructing knowledge is more and more extended by all these digital memory tools. And I wouldn't basically trust anyone who says something off the top of their head without looking it up first because we can. Why shouldn't I look up a citation because I can look it up, and it's probably more accurate if I look it up again when I write something than when I just tried to seem knowledgeable [laughs].
Kristina Hoeppner 24:55
Yeah, it will be interesting to see how the language models evolve, what different AIs are coming on board and how they of course influence education. There is a project in Germany that does actually look into analysing student portfolios through AI and give some feedback to the students. So it'll be interesting to see what is coming out of that by the end of the funding period next year.
Bob Reuter 25:23
I think these AI systems that can analyse and give feedback are more interesting for students than for teachers because, of course, I see the use by teachers, because that would simplify our job, but I don't really want to trust a machine when I evaluate and grade. Then I rather rely on my bad intuitions, and I'm totally aware that my intuitions are not always good, especially when there is time pressure and when you need to do it quickly. But generally, my gut feeling at the first pages is rarely wrong when you continue to read a student's portfolio. And we also do that collaboratively. So we have generally two or three people looking at the portfolio and then evaluating it in terms of how convincing do we think the students conveyed what they understood.
Bob Reuter 26:11
But if the students themselves would get this automatised feedback, which tells them, 'Well, you're not yet there; you still need to work,' then give them the, 'the' correct, a correct response, I would rather have them say, 'Well, you need to dig deeper, you need to work on that' because I really think that what matters to me is once you have worked and thought about the subject enough, then you will know that you know enough. As long as you ask the question, 'Is this good enough?' Then you're not there.
Kristina Hoeppner 26:46
I'd like to ask everyone the same three questions in a quick into round if that is okay with you.
Bob Reuter 26:53
Sure.
Kristina Hoeppner 26:54
Which words or short phrases, really, if you prefer, do you use to describe the portfolio work you do?
Bob Reuter 27:02
Collect, think, and think [chuckles].
Kristina Hoeppner 27:06
Yeah, thinking is really important, isn't it in this process [laughs]?
Bob Reuter 27:09
Yes.
Kristina Hoeppner 27:10
Now, what tip do you have for learning designers or instructors, who create portfolio activities?
Bob Reuter 27:18
I really like the freedom and responsibility that the students are supposed to take on. But I'm also aware that they struggle with that a lot because maybe not in all countries, but in Luxembourg, a lot of the students coming out of primary, secondary school are used to reproduce something that fell from the sky basically, in the sense that either it's teach a talk that is meant to be true, or it's from the textbook, and it's meant to be true. So why is it true? And how did this knowledge get created is rarely, I'm not saying never, but is rarely discussed in class. And what I really think is becoming more and more important and portfolio work is really helpful to do that is to learn how to learn and to use the portfolio as a place where you put down these thoughts and where you externalise your thinking so that it becomes visible, and that it also maybe shows you that you're not yet there. Because I also have used a lot of learning by teaching approaches. To a certain extent, I think portfolio work for me is learning by teaching, but you're not teaching in the sense of orally explaining, but you're doing it in writing or in pictures.
Kristina Hoeppner 28:35
What advice do you then have for portfolio authors, Bob?
Bob Reuter 28:38
Make it your own. It's really important that you make your portfolio your own that you really turn it into something that's an extension of your thinking and of your memory, so that it becomes a place that you can use to be proud afterwards, and also to create memories that are external to your brain that you can come back to.
Bob Reuter 28:58
Because you also see it in young kids. When they have done something like oral language production at the age of five, and then you record that, and then they come back to that at the age of 13, and that's wonderful because they then automatically realise, without any other person telling them, they realise that they have changed, that they have developed their way of speaking for instance.
Kristina Hoeppner 29:22
Thank you so much, Bob...
Bob Reuter 29:22
You're welcome.
Kristina Hoeppner 29:24
... for taking the time this evening and sharing with us some of your practice, and what I've really liked hearing from you, which maybe you thought is the drawback because you have large classes and can't possibly see the portfolio of every student that can give them feedback, but I think that it is still part of very good portfolio practice because not every portfolio needs to be viewed by an external audience, needs to be viewed by an assessor or by other students. Portfolios can also be used just by the learner themselves. You give students the space to create and then they essentially bring a summary at the end of the course looking over what they have done throughout the semester in their very personal space, and then just have a short and brief insight into that. So thanks so much for giving us that other possibility of working with portfolios.
Kristina Hoeppner 30:23
Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Dr Bob Reuter. Head to our website podcast.mahara.org where you can find links and the transcript for this episode. This podcast is produced by Catalyst IT, and I'm your host, Kristina Hoeppner, Project Lead and Product Manager of the portfolio platform Mahara. Our next podcast will air in two weeks. I hope you'll listen again and to tell a colleague about it so they can subscribe. Until then, create, share, and engage.