Personal Responsibility

Personal Responsibility Reflection Essay

Assignment Description
For this assignment, you will compose an essay in which you reflect on your decisions and the consequences of those choices.

Personal responsibility is defined as the ability to connect choices, actions, and consequences to decision-making.

Writing a reflection essay requires that you look back over your own thoughts and actions and consider their implications. In this essay, you will identify the consequences of your choices and actions and assess whether your decisions helped or hindered your success in this English course.

You must write a complete essay with an introduction and thesis statement, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Your thesis statement should reflect whether your choices helped or hurt your success in this class. You need to include multiple specific examples in the essay that support your thesis statement. Finally, you need a conclusion that wraps up the essay with your final thoughts.

As you reflect, consider the following actions and the consequences of your choices. You do not have to discuss all of these examples. You may also include different examples from the ones listed below; however, you need to include multiple examples.

• Buying and bringing your textbook to class
• Preparing for class
• Attending class
• Being on time for class
• Completing homework assignments
• Procrastinating (or not)
• Adhering to the syllabus and course policies
• Adhering to due dates
• Participating in class activities and/or discussions
• Participating in peer reviews
• Completing all drafts of papers
• Completing remediation (if required)
• Completing the LearnSmart Achieve (1301 only)
• Communicating with your instructor
• Asking for help
• Utilizing tutoring services

Purpose
The purpose of this essay is to assess your ability to recognize the difference between beneficial decisions that help you succeed and those that hinder or block or your ability to succeed and the consequences of those decisions. You will be assessed on your insight into the decisions you made, their consequences, and your ability to recognize the difference between beneficial and hurtful decisions. This essay will be used as the English department assessment for the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s mandated core curriculum assessment of Student Learning Outcomes (SLO). This essay will address the SLO objective of personal responsibility.

Learning Objectives
The learning objective for this essay is for you to reflect upon the decisions you have made that helped or hindered your success in this English class and the consequences of those decisions. When reflecting, you should be contemplating your future college career (and beyond) and how your choice of decisions will affect your success in and outside of school. Furthermore, this essay is another way to practice the writing skills you learned in this English class, including good sentence structure, grammar, and punctuation as well as paragraph development and supporting ideas. You will need to use your critical thinking skills when reflecting upon the consequences of your decisions and whether those choices benefitted your success or not. Writing and eloquent written expression are vital for a successful future. You will express all of these skills in this assignment.

Before you turn in this essay, reread it for sentence structure, grammar, and punctuation. Be sure every sentence makes sense and has a purpose. You will be graded on content and grammar.

Minimum Requirements
Length: 200-300 words.
Style: Your essay needs to conform to MLA standards. MLA includes double spacing, Times New Roman font, a correctly formatted heading, and your last name, your student ID (e1234567), and the page number in the upper right corner of every page.

Due Dates and Points Possible
Due Date: Check the assignment calendar for the due date for this assignment.
Total: 30 points

Course Reflection

You have just about completed English 1302 online.  For this last assignment, I want you to reflect on your experiences with the course.  Please answer the following questions in short paragraphs.

1. What challenges did this course present and how did you meet (or fail to meet) those challenges?  

2. What feedback would you like to leave for your instructor to help him or her improve the course?