What Have You Learned?

Please help me understand how you see your progress this semester by writing some short reflective narratives about your experience of the class. Please make it an honest self-assessment, describe your strengths and what you still need to work on, and the one or two most important things you’ll take away from this class. Please reflect on your progress in terms of the aims of the course, not in terms of grammar, style, and punctuation. Focus instead on the development of your critical reading, writing, and thinking skills. Consider what evidence of your learning you can show to demonstrate your learning. I’ve given you some prompts below to help you reflect on your experience in ENG 122. Your responses will be used in your ePortfolio as text to accompany documentary evidence of your progress towards mastery of the course learning objectives, so they will be crucial pieces of your argument for your final ENG 122 grade.

• Consider the ideas about college writing that you brought with you to the first day of class. What were they? How have they changed? What do you value about the way you now think about academic writing?
• What have you learned about how to read a complex piece of writing? Which of the critical reading techniques and tools (pre-reading, multi-level note taking, concept mapping, putting texts into dialogue, looking for cues to a writer’s disposition, taking note of the uses a writer makes of other voices/sources in the text) have become part of your standard approach to coming to terms with texts? Why?
• What have you learned about generating ideas to write about? Which idea generating techniques (writing and responding to questions, free writing, discussion, uncovering values, illustrating from experience/prior knowledge, interrogating key words…) do you find most valuable? Why?
• What have you learned about using revision to rethink and develop ideas?
• What have you learned about integrating your ideas with those of others in academic discourse?
• What have you learned about giving and receiving feedback on drafts?
• What challenges did you face in the course? What did you learn from facing them? What aspects of your writing process and product remain to work on in ENG 123?
• Describe one or two of your most rewarding moments of success in the course? What did you learn from them?
• What will you take away from the course to use in the writing situations you will face in the remaining years of your college education?