independent Project Reflection

One of the final steps to completing Digital Portfolio is to write a reflection essay to accompany your independent project. In the essay you should reflect not only on the growth of your project but your own growth as a self-regulated learner. The reflection essay is also an opportunity for those of you who have struggled with the independent project to explain the difficulties and obstacles you have faced.

The reflection essay should cover the project rubric items in greater detail than your quick reflections your wrote down on paper the other day. Additionally, you want to make sure you reflect on your growth as an independent learner; setting goals, conducting research, interviewing people, gathering evidence, experimenting, creating, planning, and reflecting on your task. The reflection essay should cover the following points:

• Introduce and explain your project idea. What problem does the project address? What task, phenomena, stimulus, question, or discrepancy does your project attempt to solve? You should refer to and include any relavant planning information from your blog.
  
• Analyze your efforts to solve the problem, answer the question, or complete the task through your project. Describe what research, experimentation, and/or action you have taken to complete the project. What new knowledge did you acquire through the project? What if any new knowledge did you create through the project? What have been your strengths and weaknesses working on the project?
• Explain your personal and academic connections to the project. What attracted you to the problem, question, or idea for the project? Explain why the project is important to you and also why it is important to the community and/or the world? How could the project help others?
• Explain how your project synthesized your idea, planning, research, and actions into a new creative form. What ways did you create, image, or innovate to produce your project? Remember, synthesis is the form of thinking where you create your own solution to a problem. How did your imagination help you think flexibly or take a risk?
  
• Evaluate your overall commitment to the project. Predict whether your final project will meet all your goals and offer a solution to the problem you have addressed. This is an opportunity to appraise your performance honestly and address how your project could be improved, revised, or finished.
  

The length and depth of your reflection essay is dependent on how well developed your final project will be. If you feel that your project will be incomplete, the reflection essay should be longer and describe in-depth what your portfolio group will not be able to see on your blog and in the final project. At minimum, your reflection essay should be five paragraphs, 12pt times font, double spaced, and reference any sources with MLA style.

Habits of Mind

In February everyone will be participating in a Habits of Mind based portfolio presentation. Juniors will be presenting their portfolios and discussing their work based on Brooklyn Prep's Habits of Mind. Seniors will be sitting in on the conferences to offer their insight and feedback.

Many students have a hard time talking about their work in the context of the Habits of Mind. What exactly are habits of mind?

By definition, a problem is any stimulus, question, task, phenomenon, or discrepancy, the explanation for which is not immediately known. Thus, we are interested in focusing on student performance under those challenging conditions that demand strategic reasoning, insightfulness, perseverance, creativity, and craftsmanship to resolve a complex problem. Not only are we interested in how many answers students know, but also in knowing how to behave when they DON'T know. Habits of Mind are performed in response to those questions and problems the answers to which are NOT immediately known. We are interested in observing how students produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce knowledge. The critical attribute of intelligent human beings is not only having information, but also knowing how to act on it. - Arthur L. Costa, Ed. D. and Bena Kallick, Ph.D.

Think back to yesterday's rubric for your project. The first HOM was Perspective and stated "Student has posed a question and offered a possible solution in the form of a creative project."
Many of you are unable to think about your project in the form of a question, but it really just a problem for which the explanation is not immediately known. Think about your project and try to explain it as one of the following tasks. First, we will have to define what these categories are.

• stimulus
• question
• task
• phenomenon
• discrepancy

Now that we have defined these categories, go ahead and leave a comment describing which category your project falls under and why. Please use the rest of your class time to continue solving your problem, answering your question, completing your task, or understanding a phenomenon...