Certified Coach | Educator | Learning Designer
MY PROGRAM
Capstone
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The Capstone serves as an opportunity to reflect upon, integrate, and showcase learning achievement. It must be taken as the last course in the Master’s program sequence of study. Participants will each identify a “problem of practice” in their professional experience, document how they put their program learning to use by integrating theory with practice, and author a Problem of Practice Case Study about that work. As an alternative, participants may elect to conduct an XN Project (in lieu of the Case Study). Participants will also create a Professional ePortfolio that depicts their values, strengths, and work samples from experiences that demonstrates those strengths. The Professional ePortfolio will integrate the high quality work that participants have created during the program with other work experiences, with the goal of communicating their distinctiveness to supervisors and prospective employers. The Problem of Practice case and Professional ePortfolio will also position graduates to apply for a doctoral degree if desired.
COURSE SYLLABUS
COURSE ASSIGNMENTS
The greatest challenge was reflecting and pulling so much life experience together...
COURSE REFLECTION
As I reflect, the skills I have gained starting within the program competencies framework would be as follows: as a systems thinker, I have polished my ability to articulate the connections I make between different ideas, theories, facts, data, etc. Segway into creative problem solving, while I can find a problem indeed, I am all about solutions. But specifically in a learning context, one way to get results from what you want to accomplish is to ensure you have named the correct problem. In other words, I read an article about how to conduct proper policy analysis and the author points out that a misdiagnosis leads to a faulty and failing solution (Holquist, AP Website, 2022). It is my desire to be attuned to the real problems to ensure that my energies and focus are well spent. As a culturally responsive educator, I am fully aware of my privileges. I love learning and am sensitive to the connections between behavior and culture. The final program competency is communication, I am growing as a writer. I enjoy communicating alongside learners as an educator but as someone who enjoys learning and appreciates the different ways to learn.
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To quote when considering reflection as an attitude of change the author says this:
“Reflection is not only cognitive but affective, involving attitudes such as openness,
curiosity, and a readiness to reconsider long-held ideas about oneself and the world.
“Reflection,” writes Rodgers, involves “attitudes that value the personal and
intellectual growth of oneself and others.”
Academically and professionally, I gained many different learning experiences from a 6000 level Statistics course that taught me the grit to the Issues in Education course that provided skills-based learning, for example, Articulate Rise. The greatest challenge was reflecting and pulling so much life experience together; put well by Eynon (2014), “one of the most challenging aspects of reflection is to ensure that one grounds description in specific evidence.” Graduate school is one of the best decisions I made.
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References
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Eynon, B., Gambino, L. M., & Török, J. (2014). “Reflection, Integration, and ePortfolio Pedagogy” Retrieved from http://c2l.mcnrc.org/pedagogy/ped-analysis/
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How To Conduct an Effective Policy Analysis » Community | GovLoop
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