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L
EARNING
TO
L
EARN
: B
ECOMING
A
S
ELF
-G
ROWER
75
“I was always evaluating myself, instead of assessing. An assessment
is supposed to help you build yourself up instead of break you down.”
—Anonymous student
R
EFLECTION
In this experience, you will use
Self-Assessment worksheets
as a way to help you make the shift from
doing unstructured self-evaluation on a daily basis to systematic self-assessment at critical times in order
to help you improve your daily performance and strengthen your self growth.
P
URPOSE
Self-assessment is the most powerful and productive mindset for future growth and success while self-
evaluation is the most destructive process for someone to have. Most individuals don’t make clear
distinctions between assessment and evaluation, and without knowing tend to favor evaluation over
assessment.
In the readings you will explore distinctions between assessment and evaluation. The purpose of assessment
is to improve future quality while evaluation is to judge past quality. Both of these processes are very
important in life. If performance truly matters, then we should reward high quality performers and the way
we go about this is to judge their performances through evaluation. However, most people worry about
their performance while being evaluated, and don’t focus on how to improve performance. Assessment,
especially self-assessment, is the focus on how to improve future quality in the performance.
A tool that we will be constantly using in this course, and which you have already experienced, to some
degree, is SII (
S
trengths,
I
mprovements,
I
nsights). The three components are all significant in increasing
future performance. The strengths are those aspects of performance that were critical to the current success.
Knowing why those strengths are important as well as how those strengths were produced will increase
your ability to transfer those strengths to new situations in the future. Areas for improvement are where
we can increase quality, but only when we focus on the next steps we can take with very clear action plans
for improvement. Finally, often overlooked are the insights (what we have learned, especially about our
own learning) from the performance we assessed.
Abehavior that almost everyone recognizes is the strong need for external approval or affirmation that you
are good or at least OK. This starts with parents’ constant encouragement and congratulations after each
of your performances. Without the ability to self-assess your own performance, you are in constant need
for this external affirmation. This shifts you to be extrinsically motivated versus learning to self-affirm
through quality self-assessment which leads towards intrinsic motivation.
This experience will focus on differentiating between these two processes and helping you to build a
strong tool set for doing assessment. Instead of tearing yourself down, you can focus on building yourself
up.