Reflection Assignment

Purpose: Better understand what you’ve learned from Project 1 so far so you can apply these lessons to your Project 1 presentation for Unit 9.

Task: Write a 400-word reflection about the work you’ve done for Project 1.  Then write three 50-word responses to your classmates.

Criteria for Success: A successful reflection will be honest with yourself about what worked and what could be improved, and you’ll describe lessons from this project that you can apply to future writing.

Please Note: Multimodality is Encouraged!  Please feel free to post a video of yourself talking about your project, or you can draw some pencil sketches to show your ideas.  Whatever works best, go ahead and do that. 

Note on Deadlines: the initial post is due by Wednesday.  You can return to the discussion to add your responses by Friday.

Initial Post: 400 Words

In this discussion, I’d like you to reflect on what you’ve written so far for Project 1.  You can write this in any format that works well for you — you can simply do a paragraph that addresses the five questions, or you can do bullet points, or you can rearrange the questions in an order that you prefer.

First, let’s consider what you’ve done:

• You’ve learned about a number of rhetorical terms, including aspects of genre and multimodality.

• You’ve researched some primary, secondary, and scholarly sources for your topic.

• You’ve written four research articles about your topic.

Next, let’s consider the five questions to address from Crawford’s TEDx Talk:

• What happened?

• What went right?

• What went wrong?

• Why?

• Lessons learned?

For these five questions, write the first thoughts that came to mind.  Here are some ideas to help get you started:

1. What happened? Talk about what you researched and wrote about for your articles — what kinds of articles did you produce?

2. What went well?  Which study habits helped the writing go well?  Which articles did you like the best?

3. What went wrong?  Which days did the writing go badly?  Which articles just didn’t go as well?

4. Why did it go that way? And go easy on yourself.  Something like “I was bored from staying home so many months because of coronavirus, so I played way too many video games when I should have been writing Article 2” is something to be honest about.  The goal here is to keep it real, even if you aren’t happy about how things went.  And if you are happy, talk about that.  "I spent extra time on Heartland Library for Article 4, and that's why that one went well" would be something to talk about.

5. Lessons learned?  What do will you do next time?  What will you avoid next time?  What do you wish you had known before?  Which lessons are you still trying to get yourself to learn?

Three Response Posts (50 words each)

We learn from each other.  For your response posts, simply point out something your classmate said that you find interesting.  It can be something you relate to, something you are surprised by, or something that you hope to also apply to your own writing.  If you disagree with another classmate’s experiences, please don’t dismiss them as “wrong” — instead, describe how your experiences are different.