Last year, I got to teach a cross-cultural communication class for the first time. This has been one of my favorite classes to teach. We had a team of teachers teaching the class for different students, but last semester was the first time the class was compulsory, so there wasn’t a set curriculum yet. I had a lot of freedom to design the class according to what I thought was important as long as I followed the necessary topics. I’m sure I will share more about my design for this class in a future post.
But today, I want to share something that I was required to do. I was required to have the students take notes and turn in their notes with additional reflection comments. I didn’t really like this assignment because I felt like the students should be able to take notes or not take notes based on what they wanted to focus on. But, since I had to have them do it, I decided to have them turn in notes a couple of times throughout the semester. Some of the notes were really good, and I was proud of those students for working so hard.
For the last month of the class, we didn’t have a lot of lectures, so for the last notes assignment, I decided to have the students write a reflection about what they learned throughout the semester.
I emphasized that the students needed to make the reflection personal—what had they learned and how would they apply it to their lives.
Reading my students’ reflections was one of my highlights from that class. A few students didn’t complete the assignment properly, but the vast majority of students worked hard and shared their thoughts and ideas and personal learning journeys and how the class related to those journeys.
Students shared personal things that they were going through and how the class encouraged them. Other students shared about interactions that they had had with non-Chinese people and how the things we had studied and discussed in class helped them to know how to interact with other people. Other students shared about activities that we had done in class and how those activities helped them to understand their classmates and the world and themselves more deeply.
We did a lot of activities in class, but I was surprised that one activity didn’t stand out as the most popular. Most of the students emphasized completely different activities. I really liked that because I saw that different activities resonated with different students.
This semester, I have been teaching a class about European culture. Even though I chose this class from a list of several classes, I have struggled with feeling a little bit unqualified to teach about these cultures that are quite different from my own. I have studied some of them quite a bit, but European culture is huge, and there are many things that I don’t know. But we’ve talked about a lot of things together including philosophy, religion, music, literature, art, and architecture.
When I found out that I had to give the students several assignments that I have to collect, I decided that I wanted to have the students write reflections again.
I haven’t finished reading all of the reflections, and I was pretty discouraged at the beginning because I could tell that a couple of students were just using AI to write their reflections. But then, as I read more, I found that other students have taken the assignment seriously and really thought about the class and how it relates to their lives and what they can learn from it.
Several students have also shared personal stories and things that they are going through and how the class has helped them. Other students shared about how the class has helped them to understand themselves better as they study the different eras of European thought and culture. Other students have shared about how the class helps them to interact more with other people.
I usually make the requirements of the reflection pretty basic. I give the students a word limit—not very long because I want them to just focus on one or two things that they have learned. Last semester, I think I made the assignment 300-500 words, or 150-300 words for some students that received the assignment late because of a rearranged holiday schedule. This semester, I also had them write 300-500 words.
I reminded the students that I want to see the words “I” “me” and “my” in their reflections. I emphasized that multiple times. I asked them to give specific examples of what they have learned and how that applies to their lives. This is the primary area that I focus on for their grade.
The last area I include in their grade is about correct grammar. However, for this assignment, I don’t focus on grammar and I don’t correct or mark their grammar mistakes. If I get an assignment that the student clearly didn’t try to fix their grammar and it’s impossible to understand what they mean, then I would take off some points for grammar.
Once again, I am loving reading the students reflections, and now I need to go read and grade more of those!