Self-Growth Paper Instructions

Self-Growth Paper Instructions

Goal

This course has been designed to help you grow as a learner. This assignment is meant to give you a clear time to assess growth and reflect on your future. The self-growth paper is a detailed reflection on the extent that you achieved unanticipated growth as a learner, discovered your best learning style, as well as the strengths you bring to a team.

The paper should reflect on where you started from, what you have achieved, and what you will do to continue to grow in the near future (over the next 2-3 years). For some of you those next few years will be focused on completing a major program of study and graduating. For others, those years will stretch beyond graduation into career building. Either way, how has your growth inside and outside the course prepared you for future learning? What future learning do you expect and how will you approach it?

Advice

1. It is easy for this kind of paper to be completed as required document meeting all the essential elements without giving a real sense of yourself as a learner. Pay attention to creating an authentic voice that constructs a sense of you as a real person and draws in your reader.
2. Avoid thinking there is a right answer that praises the course. It might seem best to write about how much you have learned, but a better paper might discuss how you have struggled to identify your own motivation to learn or grow. Triumphant success is not nearly as interesting for readers as deep reflection and struggle with contradictions.
3. Take the time to describe or explain your reasoning. The richer your description the more the reader understands you and the more compelling your writing.
4. If what you actually learned is different from your early goals, be sure to spend time discussing and exploring this. Often a key understanding occurs in this gap.
5. Provide evidence to support your claims of growth as a learner (even if your claim is that you have not grown in any meaningful sense, provide evidence).
6. Be sure to make explicit connections between your goals and evidence/examples. Your examples or evidence will require interpretation to tell your reader what you want her or him to make of your description.
7. Expected Length: 1000 — 1500 words

Dimensions of Grading Rubric

1. Context/Purpose: How well does student demonstrate consideration of audience of, purpose for, and context of writing – 10%
2. Content Development – How well do the ideas in the post build upon one another and elaborate purpose of the post – 15%
3. Genre Conventions – How well does the post fit the formatting, style and organization of a reflective essay – 15%
4. Evidence – How well does the student use evidence to support her or his claims throughout the essay? – 15%
5. Mechanics & Syntax – How well does the student use language to communicate meaning? – 15%
6. Learning Outcomes — Clearly identifying and discussing intended and intended learning outcomes – 15%
7. Authentic Voice – How well does the student convey the sense that she or he is a real person and draw the reader into her or his story as a learner with a past, present, and future? – 15%