Draft Due: Monday, 12/11/22

Due: Monday, 12/18/22

We have arrived at the end of the semester. Now it is time for you to pull all your work together, look at it as a whole, and reflect on what you have done over the course of the semester. You will write a final reflection (approximately 600-900 words) that takes into consideration and refers to with quotes and paraphrasing the work you have done throughout the semester:

  • Project 1: Education Narrative
  • Project 2: Reflective Annotated Bibliography
  • Project 3: Writing in a New Genre

You can also refer to, quote from, or paraphrase your:

  • OpenLab Discussion comments
  • In-class writing (collected or not)
  • Participation in class or student support hours
  • Reading materials assigned in this course or that you encountered in your research.

In writing your final reflection, you will make it a portfolio, a collection of your work from throughout the semester, by including links to final versions of all three projects plus any additional work you want to highlight in your final reflection as you write about those materials. You may revise any or all of the three projects. If you do revise, be sure to reflect on those revisions specifically by including in the final reflection a paragraph for each revision explaining the changes you’ve made and why so I know what changes to look for.

Questions for your reflection:

To write your reflection, you will refer specifically to your projects and other work from throughout the semester to address these major questions:

  1. What have you learned about yourself as a reader, writer, student, and community member (of this FYLC, at City Tech, etc) this semester?
  2. How have you changed or developed as a reader, writer, student, and community member this semester?
  3. What have you learned in this class and how will you transfer this knowledge to other writing tasks, assignments, or situations in college, professionally, or in your community.
  4. Consider the values and goals you set for yourself at the start of the semester. How have you met, missed, or changed your goals through your work and effort in this course? What advice do you have for that earlier version of yourself just starting this course and setting goals at the beginning of the Fall 2023 semester?

Review your work, and brainstorm:

To help generate material for your reflection, look back through all of your work (writing, reading, talking, thinking) from the semester. Think about any lessons that have remained with you, either about our course’s subject matter or about yourself as a student. Think about any changes in your beliefs, behaviors, or practices. Think about your expectations (of yourself, me, your classmates, the course, college, etc) and what actually happened. Think about your challenges and accomplishments. Brainstorming, freewriting, and writing a sh!tty first draft, among other techniques, can help you get started with your final reflection.

Optional: Creating your ePortfolio

Every student at City Tech can create an ePortfolio on the OpenLab to chronicle and feature their work from throughout their college career. If you are interested in creating yours, please use this as an opportunity to get started with it and add one or more pieces of work from our course to your ePortfolio to make a record of the work you did this semester and to showcase your accomplishments. To be clear, this will not replace your Final Reflection and Portfolio post on our course’s OpenLab site, but is in addition to it. You may want to reflect on the process or experience of choosing which work to add to your ePortfolio when you write your Final Reflection. Here are some OpenLab Help materials to guide you through creating and developing your ePortfolio

Grading criteria:

Your successful Final Portfolio and Reflection will be a well-organized, easy-to-understand narrative that addresses those four main questions by referring to the work you have done throughout the semester. Use the following grading criteria as a checklist to help you develop your narrative:

  • Content: your reflection has all the components listed above, is thoughtfully written, and includes details and examples that illustrate your experiences in the course by including quotations from, references to, and links to your written work from the projects, posts, and discussions this semester. And does all of this in approximately 600-900 words.
  • Organization:  Your reflection is a narrative that has a central focus. Be sure to write in paragraphs (not just one long paragraph) and order them logically–not simply a list answering the questions above but instead a narrative in which you reflect on your experience in this course this semester.
  • Presentation: Your project is written in a way that your audience can understand what you want them to take away from reading your reflection. You use formatting and sentence structure to help your readers make sense of your writing.

How to submit your work

  • Add your Final Reflection as a post on our OpenLab site
  • In that post, be sure to link out to the posts that contain your final versions for your Project 1, Project 2, and Project 3 so I can find them.
  • You can make your post private if you prefer.
  • Choose the Category Final Reflection and Portfolio Work
  • If you need help posting your work, please refer to these instructions on how to write a post.
  • If you have not submitted at least two projects already, please meet with me before submitting your final reflection and portfolio.

Photo credit: “Reflections” by Henna K. via Flickr under the license CC BY-NC 2.0 Deed