Depending on the final grade you’re aiming for this semester, you’ll need to complete, revise, and give feedback on up to two Reflection Projects. A Reflection Project consists of three components:
- The project itself, which you’ll share with your whole class Family and with Prof. Farmer (instructions here)
- Feedback on the projects, which you’ll give and receive from two other classmates (instructions here)
- Revisions to the project, which you’ll complete in response to that feedback (the page you’re on)
Revision Instructions
Higher final grades in this course require you to revise one or both of your Reflection Projects. You should receive feedback from your Family writing partners by the Tuesday after you submitted your Project, and you have until the Thursday of the following week to submit a revised version. Revising your project consists of two parts: the revisions themselves; and a revision summary.
Revising the Project
First, read over the feedback you received from your writing partners. Take a moment to process your reactions: many people, when they initially receive criticism of their work, feel protective, defensive, even angry. Those feelings are natural, but you’ll need to work past them to get something more valuable from your partners’ comments.
Once you get past that initial feeling of resistance, consider some of the following ways of interpreting feedback:
- Sometimes, you’ll simply want to implement the changes your partners suggest. Perhaps they flagged a paragraph as unclear, and you agree it needs clarifying. Perhaps there’s a historical or factual error in your writing that needs to be corrected. Perhaps they’ve pointed out something you should read, and it does indeed sound helpful, so you’ll go read it.
- Other times, you’ll need to think about how to get something out of feedback you don’t entirely agree with. For example, if a partner comments that they find part of an argument unpersuasive, that doesn’t mean you need to abandon the argument; it might simply mean you need to clarify your position, or provide further evidence. Responding to feedback doesn’t always mean doing exactly what the person suggests; but usually you can interpret their feedback as a signal that something needs to be improved.
- Finally, there may be feedback that’s simply outside the scope of what you can accomplish. You’ll need to decide which pieces of feedback are the most valuable and achievable, and focus on those. It’s possible to acknowledge that a partner has provided good feedback, without being able to actually incorporate the feedback into your revisions.
Make the revisions that seem most valuable to you and that are achievable in the time you have (about a week and a half). The project doesn’t need to become perfect; but this is your chance to make it better.
Revision Summary
After you complete your revisions, add a very brief summary of the revisions to the top of the new document. This should be no more than 2-3 sentences, or 3-5 bullet points. Give a big picture summary of the revisions you made; if relevant, consider also noting feedback you found valuable but were unable to incorporate into your revisions.
Submission
Submit the revised document, including your revision summary, to your Family’s Google Drive folder, before the deadline indicated on the course schedule.