XII. Summative Reflection
Your final requirement for Senior Capstone (due date TBA) is to author a summative reflection on your work and accomplishments in the course. Separately you will complete a course evaluation but in this summative reflection, we ask you to respond to a series of questions in which you step back and take stock of your entire Capstone experience.
There is a template for the Summative Reflection (see Appendix K) that you will receive via Google classroom (but is also available here) that you will be asked to complete and copy and paste onto your Weebly site. There is a separate tab for “summative reflection” that you created at the start of the year on that site. This is what populates that tab.
The questions that you will be asked to consider are:
1. The goal of this reflection is to ask you to examine your work over the course of this year. Start by going back to your original two proposals for a Capstone project. Consider the decisions you made along the way, beginning with the choice of one project over the other, and what influenced those decisions.
2. In virtually all of your cases, your projects expanded and/or contracted throughout the year. What you saw as possible in October became less likely come winter. Other factors may well have affected the viability of your project: snow days, as well as logistics, copyright, privacy rights, etc. Identify what hurdles/impediments/obstacles/etc. shaped your work and how you overcame, adjusted and/or avoided them through modifications to your project and its scope.
3. In the course of the research process, you went through various stages. What parts of the research process do you feel most confident about, now that you have completed the course? What aspects of research do you feel you need to improve? Some of you suggested that you needed more statistics skills. Is that true for many of you? What additional skills do you feel you needed to make your projects better?
4. All of your efforts led to a final product, consisting of one or a number of items that you turned in. Are you proud of the final product? Was there more (or less) that you wanted to do?
5. If you remember, we asked at the start of the project: “So what?” Aka: Why is this project worth doing? What makes it important/meaningful beyond your own personal curiosity about the topic? So….now that your project is complete, please reconsider the question. What is the project’s relevance beyond your own passion for it? What makes it important? What have you contributed to the bigger/wider world of knowledge? Tell us about that.
6. Concurrently you were asked to do a series of presentations (that grew incrementally longer) over the course of the year. You should have all the videos of all of these on your weebly website. The Stand and Deliver methodology helped to shape the nature of those presentations. What challenges did these presentations pose? What feedback and support helped you to overcome these challenges and help you grow as a presenter? How do you feel about your own presentation skills now? Are you more or less confident of doing these in the future?
7. Finally, we would like to know how you feel the experience of doing a Senior Capstone project prepared you for college and future professional life. Tell us what you think the ultimate value of taking Senior Capstone was for you on a personal and educational level.
Finally, congratulations! You’ve made it to the end. You have a project, a year’s worth of work (documented through your thoughtful and multi-layered website and blog), and a following, thanks to your presentation to show what you’ve achieved. Completing a Senior Capstone project at Boston Latin School is an achievement that you should reflect on with enormous pride. We are proud of you, as is the entire Boston Latin School community. Kudos to you!
Your final requirement for Senior Capstone (due date TBA) is to author a summative reflection on your work and accomplishments in the course. Separately you will complete a course evaluation but in this summative reflection, we ask you to respond to a series of questions in which you step back and take stock of your entire Capstone experience.
There is a template for the Summative Reflection (see Appendix K) that you will receive via Google classroom (but is also available here) that you will be asked to complete and copy and paste onto your Weebly site. There is a separate tab for “summative reflection” that you created at the start of the year on that site. This is what populates that tab.
The questions that you will be asked to consider are:
1. The goal of this reflection is to ask you to examine your work over the course of this year. Start by going back to your original two proposals for a Capstone project. Consider the decisions you made along the way, beginning with the choice of one project over the other, and what influenced those decisions.
2. In virtually all of your cases, your projects expanded and/or contracted throughout the year. What you saw as possible in October became less likely come winter. Other factors may well have affected the viability of your project: snow days, as well as logistics, copyright, privacy rights, etc. Identify what hurdles/impediments/obstacles/etc. shaped your work and how you overcame, adjusted and/or avoided them through modifications to your project and its scope.
3. In the course of the research process, you went through various stages. What parts of the research process do you feel most confident about, now that you have completed the course? What aspects of research do you feel you need to improve? Some of you suggested that you needed more statistics skills. Is that true for many of you? What additional skills do you feel you needed to make your projects better?
4. All of your efforts led to a final product, consisting of one or a number of items that you turned in. Are you proud of the final product? Was there more (or less) that you wanted to do?
5. If you remember, we asked at the start of the project: “So what?” Aka: Why is this project worth doing? What makes it important/meaningful beyond your own personal curiosity about the topic? So….now that your project is complete, please reconsider the question. What is the project’s relevance beyond your own passion for it? What makes it important? What have you contributed to the bigger/wider world of knowledge? Tell us about that.
6. Concurrently you were asked to do a series of presentations (that grew incrementally longer) over the course of the year. You should have all the videos of all of these on your weebly website. The Stand and Deliver methodology helped to shape the nature of those presentations. What challenges did these presentations pose? What feedback and support helped you to overcome these challenges and help you grow as a presenter? How do you feel about your own presentation skills now? Are you more or less confident of doing these in the future?
7. Finally, we would like to know how you feel the experience of doing a Senior Capstone project prepared you for college and future professional life. Tell us what you think the ultimate value of taking Senior Capstone was for you on a personal and educational level.
Finally, congratulations! You’ve made it to the end. You have a project, a year’s worth of work (documented through your thoughtful and multi-layered website and blog), and a following, thanks to your presentation to show what you’ve achieved. Completing a Senior Capstone project at Boston Latin School is an achievement that you should reflect on with enormous pride. We are proud of you, as is the entire Boston Latin School community. Kudos to you!