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...

Project Interviews

We need to determine which interview from each group is going to be re-posted here, on the class blog. In your groups, you need to read each group member's interview, leaving a brief comment on each one offering warm or cool feedback about the quality of the answers. Consider the following questions when you read the interviews.

Has the student really answered the question asked of them? Does the answer go deep into the student's experience or does it remain on the surface? Does the answer convey their individuality and personality in some way?

After reading each interview, make sure you leave a one-two sentence comment on each interview. When you are finished reading all the interviews your group must select the most illuminating and interesting interview. After you have reached a decision, leave a comment on the selected interview that states "We select this interview to represent our group." Oh, the student whose interview is selected will received extra credit for the progress report and third marking period grade. Good luck!

Thursday and Friday Agendas

Thursday

Today you will use your class time to meet the SMART goal you set for yourself yesterday. When you have finished working on your goal take a moment at 10:40 to leave a comment on yesterday's post on YOUR blog about what evidence you produced today to meet your goal. I will be checking your blogs and updating the new marking period in Edline, so this comment will count. Please use your time wisely and make some progress.

Friday

Today you will begin an email interview with your new group feedback partner (check the group posters near your table if you forgot!) . The purpose of the interview is to help your partner become aware of their thinking about the project. How does someone become aware of their own thinking? It takes conscious reflection on one's actions, beliefs, knowledge, and ideas. We do this all the time when we make decisions that affect ourselves and others. We also tend to think more about what we say when we talk publicly or in front of others. Your interviews will be published on your blogs and selected ones will be published on the class blog.

We will conduct the interviews by sharing our questions through emails between the interviewer and the interviewee. Today, you will develop specific questions for your interviewee based on the following protocol for two rounds of questions. Your questions should cover the following areas:

Round 1

• Clarify the project goals and purposes. Why are they doing the project? What is important about it? How do they expect it to turn out in the end?
  
• Planning. What actions have they taken so far? What actions do they still need to take? What will be the evidence they produce? How will they collect data? What obstacles or roadblocks do they expect to encounter?
• Taking Action and experimenting. What are the different ways they have been working? What programs, skills, and research have they been doing? What has been new for them?
  
• Assessing and Gathering evidence. What evidence have they produced so far? What have they made? What date have they collected?
  
  
  Round 2
  
• Studying, reflecting, and evaluating. Have they met their goals? What have they learned so far doing the project? Have they learned new information? Have they learned something about themselves?
  
• Modification. Have they had to make any changes to their project or plan? Has their thinking about the subject changed? Would they do anything differently now?
• Revisiting goals and purposes. Does the project still make sense?
  

Write out a specific question based on each • bullet point about the project. Email me your 7 questions to review before we move onto the next step of the project. For example a clarification question might look like: Joseph, why is it important for you to research herpes and STD? What do you want to tell people?

Again I will be checking my email and updating Edline. Your questions must be emailed to me at the end of the period (your emails have the date and time)

New Weekly Goals Post #7

Today you need to reflect on last week's goal by adding a comment. After you've reflected on your progress, you will need to post a special SMART goal for next Tuesday. I will be out of school Thursday and Friday for a project I have been working on. On Thursday, you will have the entire class period to work on your project. To that end, I would like you to set two (2) SMART goals for this week.

• The 1st goal can be your weekly goal to accomplish by next Tuesday.
  
• The 2nd goal must be a goal you will accomplish on Thursday.
  

Using the SMART goal template your second goal will start like this "By the end of 2nd period on Thursday I will........and I will know I have achieved......because........

Next week, when I get back I will be looking for concrete evidence that you met your goal for Thursday. It will count as a 'quiz', so set a goal that you know you can meet and produce some evidence for. For example, Angelica might set a goal to produce THREE new slides for her presentation on Japanese fashion. I will want to see the new slides next week.

On Friday, you will be starting the 1st part of an interview that you will conduct via Google Documents with your new group partner.

SMART Goal Setting

In order to help you set and meet your individual goals, we are going to look at protocol for goal setting that professionals use. The idea is to set smart goals that you can accomplish. So why do we call them SMART goals? Take a minute right now and think about each letter in the word SMART: S-M-A-R-T. What word might each letter stand for that would help you set and meet goals? Try and figure out at least one and leave your inference as a comment.

SMART goal indicators

• S - Simple - keep your goals directly related to the task at hand. Use your backwards plans.
• M - Measurable - your goal should show growth with demonstrable evidence.
  
• A - Achievable - your goal should be something that you can accomplish with effort.
• R - Realistic - no amount of effort or hard work can overcome an unrealistic goal.
• T - Time Table - your goal should have a deadline.

After looking at some examples of student goals, which can be found on any of the student blogs, you have to re-assess your own goals and see if they are SMART goals. If you feel that your goals aren't smart or are missing any of the indicators you can use the following template to help you set or re-set your goals.

SMART Goal template

By next blank blankI will blank blank blankand I will know I achieved blank blank blankbecause blank blank.

Does your 4th weekly goal include all the information that the SMART template provides? Everyone can practice using the template by restating your 4th weekly goal using the template and add it as a comment to your original post.

Searching For An Expert

By now everyone should have developed a list of questions and an introduction you would like to ask an expert in your project area. But how do we find experts? While there are some experts in the school that you can contact, everyone in here can start searching for an outside expert to ask for help and briefly interview with your questions. In fact, one of the best ways to gain new knowledge is to interview a person. That way, they share their knowledge in their own words, which means they are putting that knowledge in their own words from their perspective. This is a higher order of thinking that just giving you a list of facts and/or advice.

To start your expert search, you should begin by searching locally in Brooklyn and New York City in general for people with careers related to your field. For example, Mariah might search for chefs, television, New York

Let's look up the results that pop up and see if we can find contact info like an email address for Mariah.

Now that you've seen it's possible, spend some time trying different combinations of keywords in Google and see if you can find as many contacts to email your interview questions. Send me an email at the end of the period with all the contacts your are able to discover. Include the person or business's name, email address, and area of expertise.