Week Seven | 6/8–6/12
Final Project: Step #7 | SELF-Assessment & Reflection
Edited for June 8, 2020.
Back in February, you were given a post on final assessments for the year. The final exam, at that point, was an essay reflecting on the Senior Talk. That project shifted in April, as did everything, but reflecting on the experience is more important than ever. We’re now at the end of the strangest semester.
First note: You can continue to hand in final projects through Friday, June 12. The deadlines have been extended. For the next ten days, your work will be showcased and shared as part of a general celebration of your graduation.
Second note: If you aren’t able to complete and submit a project, you can earn a Pass for the quarter by completing this week’s reflective tasks in full. Those tasks have been tweaked to make this easier.
Just like in the original version of this post (from April 28), there are three tasks for the five days of Week Seven. We’ll shift focus to your entire senior year, however, for the second and third tasks:
- Reflection: Final Project (Google Form)
- Reflection: Senior Year (Google Form)
- Short Essay: Senior Year (Google Doc)
The first Google Form will allow you to talk about your Final Project and fourth quarter, and you’ll be able to answer some of the prompts whether or not you finished a project.
The second Google Form invites you to reflect on your entire senior year. It’s an outline for the third task.
The third task is to write a short essay about your senior year. This written response should follow the philosophy of our universal writing work — that is, it should seek out interesting and surprising insights into your learning.
This last essay is truly about what you take away from your senior year. You are entering a world that seems to change every day, where the only certainty is uncertainty, and where just about any cliche seems likely to come ytrue.
That’s why it’s important for you to think about what you learned about how you learn. It is, once again, about the fundamental goal of authentic learning:
We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.
~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Use the steps of the writing guide:
Whether you have an intended audience of one or everyone, use to the metaphor of the river and the purpose of writing: