Page 92 - Learning to Learn

READING EXPERIENCE 4: SELF -ASSESSMENT: THE ENGINE OF SELF-GROWTH
92 L EARNING TO LEARN: BECOMING A SELF-GROWER
STEP 1 Recognize a need to reflect.
Our student thinks that this instance of procrastination when analyzed might help him produce better work in
the future.
STEP 2 Pick a time and place for reflection.
He decides to do the reflection while taking a long walk in the afternoon after class. He believes that this setting
will be relatively free from distractions.
STEP 3 Play back the experience which triggered the reflection.
He plays back the experience. He recalls how he had received the assignment with a month of lead time; he
remembers being too busy with other schoolwork and social activities to start it before Thanksgiving vacation;
he replays his dismay at discovering that the Internet was down; he remembers doing his best to design the web
pages in Dreamweaver™ (8 hours spent doing this, discovering 4 errors); he recalls how he returned to school
and spent 5 hours discovering and correcting errors (6) and poor design flaws; he remembers how he tried to
correct the errors (one not corrected) before class; he replays how he was forced to admit the problems to the
teacher; and finally, he recalls how he was given a reprieve and was able to complete the project several days
late and not in a most efficient manner although the appearance was acceptable.
STEP 4 Document all insights in a reflection log.
Since he forgets to bring a notebook on the walk to jot down his insights, he lists them when he returns to his
room. This is what he discovers as a result of his reflection:
1. He often avoids what he doesn’t want to do and replaces those activities with more desirable activities.
2. He conveniently forgets to do unpleasant tasks and should therefore write down daily tasks and tick them off.
3. He realizes that his project involved sections of code that were repeated several times. He might have saved
himself some time had he saved these as he would not have had to retype them or look back through the code
to find them.
4. He notes that when coding in HTML, one of the most common errors is failing to close commands. Using
Dreamweaver™, when the user gives the command </, the program tries to fill in the last open command;
this helps catch unclosed commands before the user has gone too far.
5. He concludes that he ought to have tested the web project in more than one browser.
6. He decides that it would have helped had he accessed examples of similar web pages online as he designed
his own in order to expand his ideas.
7. He realizes that he is a bad judge of the length of time required to develop such a project.
8. He notes that he also had a lot of work for other classes and that these took priority before Thanksgiving,
particularly those involving group work and those with tests before the break.
STEP 5 Play a lot of “what-if” games.
He asks some “what-if” questions to get the insights above: What if he had not put off starting the project? What
if the Internet had not been down at home? What if he had come back early from Thanksgiving break? What if
he had saved key sections of code in a separate file to make it easier to reuse them? What if he had kept a to-do
list? What if he had tested the project in different browsers? What if he had studied less for other courses or
spent less time working in groups? What if he had not gone out with friends one night?