Last Post - Final Reflection

Final Reflection

            This semester, in English, each student focused on a specific topic relating to education. I focused on Criminal Justice and Police Education.  My inquiry question was: the differences between a Criminal Justice degree and the education received in a Police Academy and whether or not the Criminal Justice degree is necessary. Even though my topic was unique, I found that the assignments actually helped me further my inquiry. The class was focused around analyzing different aspects of education and Police education fits right into that category. Each day we completed “day book” entries. These entries were prompted by a question or a quote given by the teacher. These entries were called “writing into the day”. They were helpful in deepening my inquiry because some such as the March 18 writing into the day helped me with my research into my topic. This day book entry was about reading a book and asking questions and finding the answers in the text.

            We had quite a few assignments in the class. Most of the assignments helped me to further my inquiry process as well as deepen my writing development. We had various reading assignments in the class as well. The reading assignments also served to further our inquiry. In the Bottom of the Ivory Tower is about Ms. L, a middle-aged woman struggling to write a research paper. The reading detailed what she was doing wrong which helped us to avoid those mistakes in our own paper and seek help. On our blog for the class, we posted a reading response to each reading assignment. In the reading response, we analyzed the reading and explained how it related to out inquiry and how it helped us to further out inquiry. The Ms. L reading response details what I should avoid in my research paper based on Ms. L’s mistakes. The Writing History was one of the first assignments that I completed. It helped me to get started thinking about how to write a good paper and how to improve as a writer. The objective of the paper was for the student to outline their writing history in order to learn more about their writing process and how to better understand how to become a better writer. The Writing History didn’t relate directly to my topic, but it helped me with my writing in general.

            I think that the Exploratory Essay was a good preparation for my inquiry project because it helped me to start thinking about how to relate multiple works into one or two underlying themes. In my Research paper, I took all five sources that I had and I wrote each section of my paper based on one source. After I wrote all sections of my paper, I connected all sources to my underlying them: Is a Criminal Justice degree necessary to be an effective Police Officer?

             The Research Proposal was the first assignment that directly related to my inquiry topic. My research proposal was basically an explanation of my inquiry topic. My research proposal is so helpful because it serves as a reference throughout my entire inquiry process. After I wrote my research proposal, I started gathering my sources. My class spent a day in the library learning how to do proper research. This was very helpful because I didn’t realize the school library had so many resources available. After gathering sources, our next assignment was an Annotated Bibliography. The Annotated Bibliography was extremely helpful. I relied on this for the rest of the course until I finished the multimodal project. The Annotated Bibliography is basically a long Works Cited page. With every source that is cited, there is a brief summary, explanation, and analysis of the source. The Annotated Bibliography also explains how I will use each source in my final inquiry project. The Annotated Bibliography leads right into writing the drafts of the paper.

            Joining the Conversation is where the paper actually starts to be written. In step #1 of Joining the Conversation (JTC), the assignment was to write a play involving some scenario with you and all five of your sources. This step helped me to get familiar with my sources. As I started writing the next steps and started finalizing my paper, I didn’t rely on the play at all when writing my paper. The main purpose of writing the play was to familiarize us with our topics. Step #2 of JTC was to make our play into an academic essay. The main assignment that I used here to help me write this assignment was the Annotated Bibliography. The summaries and analyses of the sources gave me a great outline to write my academic essay. This assignment was basically a first draft of my final paper. This assignment was a minimum of three pages. When I wrote my third step, I had to add two pages to the paper. Joining the Conversation step #3 was the final draft of my final inquiry project. This was the final research paper. It was a minimum of five pages, the longest assignment in the class. The whole class was centered on exploring our inquiry topics and the class led up to this final inquiry project.

            We had two more assignments after we finished the final inquiry paper. We had to do a “multimodal” project. This project was the last assignment relating to our inquiry. The assignment was challenging. It took a lot of critical thinking and problem solving to get this assignment completed. The class was split into groups, each group had similar topics and was to create some kind of video that included and connected each person’s inquiry topic. This assignment was very challenging because my topic was so unique. My topic only related to one other person and so we had to really stretch our topics to make them similar. The purpose of this topic was to help us understand how presenting our topics in a different form allow us to view and analyze the material differently.  The final piece in the class is this assignment. This is a final reflection of the class and all the assignments completed. The final reflection serves as a way for us to think about how we have improved as writers and how we explored our inquiry topics. In this paper, we look at how each assignment and class activity relates to our inquiry. This is also a way for the teacher to analyze whether or not her system of assignments are effective.