Overview:
An important part of working in a scholarly community is learning to identify the ways that other people contribute to your learning. Conversely, one of the great satisfactions of working in the opportunity to contribute to other people’s learning. McGonigal calls this feeling “naches” and identifies it as one of the more powerful ways to build social bonds and boost an individual’s confidence and satisfaction To these ends, I’m asking you to write a short “learning assists” each week of the term.
For each Learning Assist, you’ll write 2-3 sentences, identifying a classmate who in some way contributed to your learning that week and explaining how they did so. Whenever possible, you should identify your classmate by name (and, after the first week or so of class, this should always be possible).
Learning Assists are private and anonymous. Each week, I will tell you if one or more people in the class named you in a Learning Assist. However, I won’t identify who named you in their Assist or what they said about you.
You are, of course, free to tell people yourself when they help your learning, but that’s purely your decision.
Possible Sources of Learning Assists:
Here are a few ways that someone might contribute to your learning in a given week:
- Explaining an assignment or course concept to you in a way that helps your understanding
- Asking a question in class that leads your instructor or someone else to clarify something you didn’t fully understand
- Making an argument or describing a personal experience that allows to see an issue from a new perspective
- Providing helpful feedback on your writing or coursework
- Contributing significantly to a course-related discussion that you found interesting or beneficial (even if you can’t point to a specific thing you learned from it)
- Making a mistake or misstatement that gives your instructor or your peers the opportunity to clarify some aspect of the course material
- Pointing out someone else’s mistake (including the instructor) in a way that leads to greater clarity or understanding
- Improving the overall atmosphere or comfort level of the course in some way
- Making you feel included and “heard” by acknowledging your contribution to a discussion.
This is not a comprehensive list, though. If you can identify another way that a peer has helped you learn in a given week that doesn’t fit into one of the categories above, feel free to tell me about it.
If You Can’t Think of a Shout-Out:
If you really try, I’m confident that you will be able to identify at least one way a peer has helped you learn in any given week. However, if you’re absolutely stuck, here are a few other options. Please use these sparingly, though, if you use them at all:
- Describe a way that one of your classmates contributed to someone else’s learning. If, for example, someone in your discussion group went out of their way to encourage a shy classmate to contribute to the conversation, you mention that person in your Learning Assist for the week.
- Describe a way you contributed to someone else’s learning that week.
- Describe something significant you learned from a classmate in this course that doesn’t directly relate to the course material, but you appreciated learning nonetheless.
- Describe something specific that occurred in the previous week that helped you to understand some aspect of the course material more clearly, even if a specific classmate didn’t contribute to that moment of clarity.
Additional Notes:
- Avoid backhanded compliments—that is, compliments that actually criticize the person in question. (e.g. “My peer reviewer didn’t really give me any useful feedback, so I guess I learned how not to write a peer review.”)
- Try to vary the people you name in your Learning Assists. If you really like or admire a particular person in the class, or if a few people tend to dominate the conversation every day, it will be tempting to write Assists about them every week. As the term goes on, though, give some thought to the way quieter or more reserved students contribute to the class, and how you benefit from their participation.
- Don’t overstate things. A peer doesn’t have to blow your mind or completely change your understanding of something in order to earn a Learning Assist. They just have to do something that in one way or another helps you learn.
Sample Shout Out:
This assignment is lightly adapted from one that Dr. Chico Zimmerman developed for his courses and shared with me. Chico and I have discussed reflective writing many times, and this assignment really helped me to see how reflective writing could be used to build a sense of class community.
