We are in the final week of the course. Assessment of reflective practice is the topic and although it is only Wednesday and there is time yet, this doesn't seem to have grabbed people's attention. Participants are already beginning to leave the course.
I have been thinking about this and wondering why. There is no doubt that people are interested in assessment. It always comes up in the first week of the course as something that people want to know more about. How should we assess our students' reflective writing and practice? This was also my experience when I ran a face-to-face workshop on reflective learning. I had planned for people to discuss assessment at the end of the course, but it came up within the first five minutes and was what people wanted to discuss straight away. It was the issue that was at the front of their minds.
The problem is - how can you discuss assessment if you might not know enough about the process that you want to assess? So why is it that when we finally get to assessment in the final week of the course, there isn't a lot of engagement.
I'm wondering if it's to do with the tension between personal practice and other people's practice (in this case our students' practice). On this course, in the first three weeks we take people deep into their own personal practices. They are not working individually. They are interacting with others and in Week 2 working collaboratively on a task. But the tasks involve deep introspection. I'm wondering if it's just too much to expect people to come out of this at the end of Week 3 and turn their attention outwards to the needs of their students. Or it may be that the first three weeks of the course implicitly answers the questions about assessment that are written into the Week 4 content.
It definitely seem as though the first three weeks cover what people need and after that they don't feel the need to continue. It'll be interesting to see whether we get any feedback on this.
