Draft Due: Monday, May 20.

Final Reflection and Portfolio (and all work) Due: Wednesday, May 22.

Reflection 

(approx 600-900 words)

We have arrived together at the end of the semester! Now it is time for you to reflect on what you have learned and accomplished over the last few months. You will write a final reflection in which you consider the three questions below as you consider the projects you’ve done, the materials you’ve read, the thinking and learning you’ve done in this course. Be sure to write about any revisions you have done, explaining the changes you’ve made to those projects and why so I know what to look for as I re-grade those projects.

As you write, consider your purpose and audience for your reflection. I am part of your audience, but I would also love to share your final reflections with future ENG 1121 students. Even if you choose to make your post private, you can imagine your classmates and future ENG 1121 students included in your audience. 

Questions for your reflection:

  1. What have you learned about yourself as a reader, writer, or student this semester? How have you changed or developed? Include specific examples.
  2. Considering what you learned in this class, how will you transfer this knowledge to other writing tasks, assignments, or situations in college, professionally, or in your community. You might also consider how you transferred what you learned in ENG 1101 or other classes to the work you did in ENG 1121.
  3. What is one piece of work from ENG 1121 that you would highlight in your ePortfolio, for an application for an internship or employment opportunity, or in responding to an interview question about your work at City Tech? Explain what this work shows about you.

In the course of your reflection, use examples from your own writing from each of the three projects from this semester. Quote passages from your writing that illustrate something about your writing, the assignment, or the genre, and explain why you have included these particular examples of your writing.

Review your work, and brainstorm:

To help generate material for your reflection, look back through all your work (writing, reading, talking, thinking) from the semester. Use any of the following more detailed questions to help you brainstorm ideas for answering those main questions for your reflection:

  • What did you expect to learn in this class? What did you actually learn?
  • What are some notable lessons that have stuck with you after completing certain assignments?
  • How does your work from early in the semester compare to your work now?
  • What changed in your writing (and reading and thinking) as the genres changed or as you became more experienced?
  • What assumptions/beliefs about yourself, writing, college, etc have changed since the beginning of the semester? How have they since changed? What motivated these changes?
  • What techniques or ways of thinking about writing helped you this semester?
  • What was your experience when revising assignments? If you revised any of your assignments, be sure to identify what you changed and reflect on the changes.
  • How did feedback on your writing or other input (eg from me, classmates, tutors, librarians, your personal support team) factor into your work? What additional feedback would have been helpful?
  • This course did not have late work penalties–how did that affect your work and your work habits?
  • What was particularly challenging for you in our course this semester and how did you overcome it (or attempt to)?
  • What advice do you wish someone had given you to help you with this course? What difference would it have made for your learning and your writing?
  • What advice do you have for future ENG 1121 students?
  • What advice do you have for ENG 1121 instructors as they prepare to teach this course again.

Grading criteria:

This is a graded assignment, worth 10% of your final grade.

Your successful Final Portfolio and Reflection will be a well-organized, easy-to-understand narrative that addresses those three 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 addressed the three main questions 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, making a claim about your development in ENG 1121. 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 about your experience in this course this semester. Your reflection will have a thesis statement, even if it doesn’t come at the end of your first paragraph.
  • 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

  • Share your Final Reflection and Portfolio by publishing it as a post on our OpenLab site
  • In that post, be sure to link out to the posts for your Project 1, Project 2, and Project 3 so I can find them. If you revise a project for the final portfolio, include a link to both the original and the revised versions. If you revise within the same post, be sure I know to look for a revised version so I can re-grade it!
  • You can include your links to your projects in a list at the start of the reflection, or you can link out to each as you write about them in your reflection.
  • You can make your post private if you prefer, or available only to members of or course, or only signed-in OpenLab members, or make it publicly available. See #2 in the Publishing Your Post section of this Help page on writing a post for help.
  • Choose the category Final Reflection and Portfolio
  • If you want, you can add an image at the start of your reflection or any other place throughout, or add a featured image (find that option in the Post settings in the sidebar below Categories and Tags). Be sure to include an image credit and only use images you have the rights to use (i.e. your own images, those in the public domain, or those with a Creative Commons license).
  • 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, please meet with me before submitting your final reflection and portfolio.

Support

Please be sure to talk with me, come to student support hours (office hours), and conference with me to help you with this project. Also, be sure to ask any questions you have in class, as a comment on this post, or via email. We will have time in class to work on brainstorming and drafting.

I know you’ve each developed as writers and students this semester, and I look forward to reading your thoughts about your experience.

Image Credit

“Reflection” by Paul Saad via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0