Each week you will practice being a reflective practitioner. That means you will set some goals for yourself and reflect on your progress on achieving them. For purposes of growth in this course, please be sure to establish goals related to advanced written and oral communication. It might help to review the objectives of the course, or as you are considering the work for any given week, reflecting on your process in accomplishing those tasks and using those as a springboard for goal setting. Please keep your goals within reason to help yourself manage them. For instance, it is more reasonable to establish a goal of mastering the research question than it is to want to write a novel in a week. Small accomplishments can lead to big change. By the end of the course, it is the goal of this course to help you grow intellectually through a self-directed approach in order to foster a continuation of that growth for life-long learning.

1. For your Growth Improvement Plan and Reflective Journal (GIP/RJ) you are to establish two goals early in the week. Discuss why you have established those goals, and how you plan to achieve those goals. Then, at the end of the week, return to your GIP/RJ and reflect on your progress.

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FOR Example:

Week 1

Goal 1: I want to come up with some attention-getters for essays.

Goal 2:

Reasons for the goals: The first goal is a result of my struggles with opening my essays. I want to try to have more options so that I'm not stuck when it comes to writing papers in my future classes.

Plans to achieve the goals: For goal 1, I plan to conduct some research on the web to find examples of types of attention-getters. I also want to look through some of the work from my academic discipline to see how others in my field open their work.

Reflection on progress: I feel I was successful at meeting goal 1. I was able to find ten examples on the web that helped me with a variety to choose from. I also found writers in my field have three types of openers that are typically used. For example, many of them open with a famous quotation, so that is one great way I can open my essays in the future.