Self-Assessments

Part of our journey this semester will be reflecting on the writing process.  This will involve your honest, self-assessments of your work on each of component of your Climate Change in My Community project.  We'll build upon them each unit, identifying areas of weakness and strength and trying to strategize ways to improve with each submission.

To be successful on the self-assessments, you will need to:

• devote enough time to their thoughtful completion - when students rush through these at the end, it's very apparent and you won't earn full credit; you should assume the self-assessment process will take you at least 1-2 hours to complete with the appropriate detail to earn full credit
   
• absorb the writing feedback you're receiving - obviously this won't really apply to the first unit's submission, but for units 2 and 3, we'll be building upon identified strengths and weaknesses in your earlier writing; you'll need to absorb and utilize that feedback to make meaningful progress both in your subsequent writing and the revisions you make to earlier writing for the final submission
   
• be honest - sometimes, your writing doesn't come together because you got too busy or waited until the last minute (I see a lot of this on the self-assessments for this class!); it's ok - writing doesn't happen in a vacuum and it's important for me as the instructor to understand whether your submission is littered with grammatical errors because you were pressed for time and didn't proofread or because you're not picking those things up during careful proofreading because that leads to different strategies for improving upon the problem 
  • Your honest assessment of the state of your writing helps me provide you with better feedback.
     
• be realistic - ideally, our rubrics should line up pretty closely; when they don't though that helps me better understand where you think you're doing really well or struggling mightily and opens up a pathway for communication about how best to get things on the right track; if you submit a rubric in which you've simply just assigned yourself full credit or no credit, I don't get a good sense of how you really understand your writing (unless you genuinely think you've knocked something out of the park - which happens!)
  • This is why it's really helpful to me if you fill in the comments sections of the rubric.