Essential Word Reflection
The Essential Words that we created this year for the banners represent the ideas we want to live by as a class. This includes how we treat each other, but the Essential Words go beyond our relationships with each other. They encompass everything we do including the way we approach and carry out our writing.
Directions: Reflect on your gender issues essay. Think about the process of writing this essay, from drawing out the gender stereotypes, watching the “Like a Girl” video, reflecting on how stereotypes affect you, researching an issue that was important to you, creating an outline, giving and receiving feedback from the musical chairs activity, and using the weekend to write a final draft. Look at all of the essential words and their definitions. Choose TWO of the essential words and write a half-page to a full page reflection on how you put these two words into practice during the process of writing this essay. Use specific examples for each word (see my example below for how specific I’d like you to get). Upload this reflection to your DP when it is finished.
For those of you who like structure:
Essential Words:
Example Reflection:
Janna Bunosky
English I
Janna
9/15/14
Gender Issues Reflection: Quality and Collaboration
Out of all of the essential words, I’d like to reflect on how I strived for quality and collaboration when creating my gender issues paper.
Throughout the process of writing this essay, I strived to create a quality essay. To me, quality means that the product is my best work. I tried to make this paper my best work by researching many texts on my topic and also by purposefully planning the structure of the paragraphs.
I researched many texts before writing this essay. At the start of my research, I remembered a text from my Cognition and Learning class at USD that related to the topic of gender differences in the classroom. I dug up an old copy of that article and reread it. I also did a lot of google searches using various keywords to see if any studies refuted the findings from the article I had already read. I wanted to see particularly what more current research had to say, since my article was published in 1985. I found that the current research reported similar results as my initial paper and stated their findings in less eloquent words and with less explanation as to the causes of their findings. That’s why I chose to use the initial article, even though it was older.
The second way that I tried to create a quality product was by carefully planning out the structure of the essay. When I finally sat down to write the paper, I first outlined my ideas to make sure that my argument flowed logically from one idea to the next. Since the goal of my paper was to explain why I thought the inequality of student voices in the classroom was such an important issue to address, I wanted to first explain the gender differences in voice in the classroom. I did this by sharing statistics on how often girls were interrupted compared to boys, and how often girls spoke compared to boys. Both of these statistics showed that boys dominated the conversations. In addition to these statistics, I also thought that my personal experiences were important in helping the reader understand why I thought this issue was so important. So, I wrote about what I was seeing in my own classroom and in my family. I know that personal information often shows bias, and in explanatory papers, oftentimes we want to shy away from personal experiences and just state the facts, but in this case, I thought that my personal experiences shed more light on the importance of this issue than just the facts.
The other word that I would like to reflect on is collaboration. I realized that I didn’t collaborate with others on this paper as much as I would have liked to. I wrote this paper by myself, and ultimately for myself. During class, one of my students mentioned how redundant my topic sentences were. If I had a student or a teacher proofread my paper before I photocopied sixty of them for my students, maybe one of those editors would have suggested some rephrasing to make the wording more appealing to students. This is very difficult for me. I really struggle with showing others my work because I lack confidence as a writer and fear what others will say about my work. However, I know the benefit of collaborating with others, and so I need to push myself to be bold and brave and get my work into someone else’s hands.
For my next paper, I still want to spend the same amount of time researching and reflecting on the topic as I did for this paper. I think that was what made this paper as good as it was. In addition to this time and effort, I would like to collaborate with at least one person. I want that one person to read my paper and to give me feedback on how they think I can make it better.
The Essential Words that we created this year for the banners represent the ideas we want to live by as a class. This includes how we treat each other, but the Essential Words go beyond our relationships with each other. They encompass everything we do including the way we approach and carry out our writing.
Directions: Reflect on your gender issues essay. Think about the process of writing this essay, from drawing out the gender stereotypes, watching the “Like a Girl” video, reflecting on how stereotypes affect you, researching an issue that was important to you, creating an outline, giving and receiving feedback from the musical chairs activity, and using the weekend to write a final draft. Look at all of the essential words and their definitions. Choose TWO of the essential words and write a half-page to a full page reflection on how you put these two words into practice during the process of writing this essay. Use specific examples for each word (see my example below for how specific I’d like you to get). Upload this reflection to your DP when it is finished.
For those of you who like structure:
- Intro Paragraph: State the two essential words you’d like to reflect upon.
- The two essential words I’d like to discuss for my Gender Issues paper are _____________ and _______________.
- Body paragraphs: Explain how you used (or didn’t use) the essential word when crafting this essay.
- I strived for ___________________ when I _____________.
- Conclusion paragraphs: Explain your goals for your next essay and any questions, concerns or fears you have about writing your next paper.
- For my next paper, I’d like to keep doing _______________________ . I would like to improve upon _____________ by _____________________________.
Essential Words:
- Quality: The word quality means putting your best effort on something to make it presentable and so that it exceeds other work. It means to excel in all aspects of life from classwork to physical endeavors.
- Collaboration: Collaboration means that a group works together to find/create a solution by sharing ideas and incorporating everyone's skills and talents into the project. It means having everyone come together or working together to create something better.
- Determination: The word determination means that you have the will and encouragement to do something even if it might be challenging. It means to keep trying if even if you fail.
- Boldness: BOLD! When we think about this word, we think of courage, bravery, of standing out, and of being different. It means to have courage.
- Thoughtfulness: The word thoughtfulness means to think about others. It means to make someone feel better. It means to think about how others feel.
- Kindness: Kindness means going out of our way to help others.
- Challenge: The word challenge means something hard to accomplish: a goal with a lot of difficult phases. It means trying to figure something out.
- Uniqueness: The word unique means that you are special. No one is like you, and no one can be like you. It means to do what you want and not what others want you to do. It means that being odd doesn’t matter if it makes you happy.
Example Reflection:
Janna Bunosky
English I
Janna
9/15/14
Gender Issues Reflection: Quality and Collaboration
Out of all of the essential words, I’d like to reflect on how I strived for quality and collaboration when creating my gender issues paper.
Throughout the process of writing this essay, I strived to create a quality essay. To me, quality means that the product is my best work. I tried to make this paper my best work by researching many texts on my topic and also by purposefully planning the structure of the paragraphs.
I researched many texts before writing this essay. At the start of my research, I remembered a text from my Cognition and Learning class at USD that related to the topic of gender differences in the classroom. I dug up an old copy of that article and reread it. I also did a lot of google searches using various keywords to see if any studies refuted the findings from the article I had already read. I wanted to see particularly what more current research had to say, since my article was published in 1985. I found that the current research reported similar results as my initial paper and stated their findings in less eloquent words and with less explanation as to the causes of their findings. That’s why I chose to use the initial article, even though it was older.
The second way that I tried to create a quality product was by carefully planning out the structure of the essay. When I finally sat down to write the paper, I first outlined my ideas to make sure that my argument flowed logically from one idea to the next. Since the goal of my paper was to explain why I thought the inequality of student voices in the classroom was such an important issue to address, I wanted to first explain the gender differences in voice in the classroom. I did this by sharing statistics on how often girls were interrupted compared to boys, and how often girls spoke compared to boys. Both of these statistics showed that boys dominated the conversations. In addition to these statistics, I also thought that my personal experiences were important in helping the reader understand why I thought this issue was so important. So, I wrote about what I was seeing in my own classroom and in my family. I know that personal information often shows bias, and in explanatory papers, oftentimes we want to shy away from personal experiences and just state the facts, but in this case, I thought that my personal experiences shed more light on the importance of this issue than just the facts.
The other word that I would like to reflect on is collaboration. I realized that I didn’t collaborate with others on this paper as much as I would have liked to. I wrote this paper by myself, and ultimately for myself. During class, one of my students mentioned how redundant my topic sentences were. If I had a student or a teacher proofread my paper before I photocopied sixty of them for my students, maybe one of those editors would have suggested some rephrasing to make the wording more appealing to students. This is very difficult for me. I really struggle with showing others my work because I lack confidence as a writer and fear what others will say about my work. However, I know the benefit of collaborating with others, and so I need to push myself to be bold and brave and get my work into someone else’s hands.
For my next paper, I still want to spend the same amount of time researching and reflecting on the topic as I did for this paper. I think that was what made this paper as good as it was. In addition to this time and effort, I would like to collaborate with at least one person. I want that one person to read my paper and to give me feedback on how they think I can make it better.