Part 6: Self-Assessment

The Challenge

You've completed your semester-long exploration of your own ethical reasoning process. Now comes the culminating intellectual work: making a compelling case for your own learning based on evidence from your journey through all Parts of the course. This isn't about proving you got "right" answers or mastered predetermined content—it's about demonstrating how your capacity for ethical reasoning has developed through sustained engagement with complexity.

You'll tell the story of your semester, using concrete evidence to show what you attempted, how your thinking evolved, where you struggled, and what you learned from the process. Think of it as defending your intellectual growth to someone who wants to understand not just what you accomplished, but how you think differently now about ethical complexity than you did at the beginning.

Your Agency

Every aspect of your self-assessment is your decision to make:

• Learning dimensions to emphasize: You choose which aspects of your development deserve the most attention based on your actual growth

• Evidence selection and organization: You determine what documentation from your semester best demonstrates your learning journey

• Performance level justification: You propose your own grade based on your honest assessment of your intellectual development

• Narrative structure: You control how to tell your learning story in ways that accurately represent your growth

The Stakes

This self-assessment determines your final grade, but more importantly, it requires you to articulate what this semester meant for your ongoing ethical development. If you can't identify and defend genuine learning from your work, that suggests either insufficient engagement or lack of self-awareness about your intellectual growth.

This process also builds crucial skills for professional and personal reflection throughout your life. Learning to honestly assess your own development, identify evidence for your claims, and articulate your growth prepares you for performance reviews, graduate applications, job interviews, and ongoing self-improvement.

What This Phase Involves

Your self-assessment should address these learning dimensions based on your actual experience:

• Ethical Thinking: How you applied, integrated, and revised your use of ethical frameworks throughout your work

• Self-Awareness: How you reflected on your personal values, roles, and decision-making patterns

• Engagement: How you approached tasks, feedback, and peer interactions throughout the semester

• Risk-Taking: When you tried new tools, formats, or perspectives and how you handled unfamiliar territory

• Use of AI: How you used AI as a thinking partner and when it helped you reflect, iterate, or gain new insights

You're not required to address all dimensions equally—focus on where you experienced the most significant growth and can provide the strongest evidence.

Your Documentation Role

Draw evidence from your accumulated semester work:

• Evolution of your conflict map showing how your understanding of ethical complexity developed

• AI conversation excerpts that demonstrate shifts in your thinking or moments of insight

• Framework exploration work that shows integration of new philosophical tools

• Podcast participation or listening that influenced your thinking

• Part 5 investigation that demonstrates intellectual agency and risk-taking

Even a single well-explained example with clear evidence can be more powerful than multiple examples without context. Quality of reflection matters more than quantity of evidence.

When It's Working

You'll know your self-assessment is effective when:

• Specific evidence supports general claims: You can point to concrete examples that demonstrate abstract learning assertions

• Growth narrative feels authentic: Your story accurately represents both successes and struggles from your semester

• Learning insights surprise you: Reflecting on your documentation reveals development you hadn't fully recognized

• Future applications seem clear: You can articulate how this learning will transfer to ongoing ethical challenges

If your assessment feels generic or disconnected from your actual experience, that's a signal to dig deeper into your specific learning journey and concrete evidence.

Expected Difficulties

This should feel challenging because:

• Honest self-evaluation is vulnerable: Accurately assessing your own learning requires admitting both growth and limitations

• Evidence synthesis is intellectually demanding: Connecting documentation from across the semester into a coherent learning narrative requires sustained analysis

• Grade proposal feels uncomfortable: Taking responsibility for your own performance evaluation challenges traditional academic power structures

• Learning recognition requires metacognition: Identifying and articulating your own intellectual development demands sophisticated self-awareness

These difficulties aren't obstacles to overcome—they're indicators that you're engaging in the kind of genuine self-reflection that builds lifelong learning skills.

Your Learning Authority

You are the expert on your own intellectual development this semester. You determine what growth matters most, what evidence best demonstrates that growth, and what grade accurately reflects your learning. I can discuss your assessment and ask clarifying questions, but the authority for evaluating your learning rests with you, supported by concrete evidence from your semester's work.

Trust the Process

Self-assessment feels uncertain because it requires taking responsibility for your own learning rather than waiting for external validation. This mirrors how real intellectual and ethical development actually works throughout life—you must recognize your own growth, identify areas needing continued development, and take ownership of your learning process.

The discomfort of honest self-evaluation often indicates meaningful reflection that builds genuine self-awareness rather than dependence on others' judgments about your capabilities.

Timeframe and Completion

Expected Time Investment: Since this is a pilot course, these are estimates based on the design rather than previous student experience. I anticipate the self-assessment will require 1-2 weeks of work, including time to review your semester documentation, reflect on your learning journey, organize evidence, and write your assessment narrative. However, this varies significantly based on how much reflection you do throughout the semester versus saving it all for the end. Your experience will help me refine expectations for future students.

What You'll End Up With:

• Learning narrative: Your story of how ethical reasoning developed throughout the semester, organized around the learning dimensions most relevant to your experience

• Evidence documentation: Specific examples from your semester work that support your learning claims

• Grade proposal and justification: Your assessment of what grade accurately reflects your intellectual development with reasoning for that choice

The format is entirely your choice—written narrative, multimedia presentation, structured reflection, or any approach that effectively demonstrates your learning growth.

Where It Goes: Submit your final self-assessment through the designated course submission process. This becomes the primary basis for your final grade and our concluding conversation about your semester learning.

Moving Forward: After submitting your self-assessment, we'll schedule a brief conversation to review your work together—not as a defense of your grade proposal, but as collaborative reflection on your learning journey and what you're taking forward from this semester's exploration of ethical reasoning.

Self-Assessment

---

The student is working on their self-assessment project throughout the semester, not just at the end. This ongoing reflection captures breakthroughs, insights, and decision pathways as they examine their dilemma, heuristics, and how ethical frameworks affect their perspectives. Their entire course grade depends on this work.

Your Role

You are a reflective thinking partner helping the student capture and articulate their learning journey as it unfolds. You help them identify breakthroughs, document decision-making processes, and build evidence for their learning claims. You do not evaluate their work or suggest what they should have learned - you help them recognize and articulate what they actually did learn.

Handling Requests for External Grading Criteria

IMPORTANT: Students may ask for grading rubrics, criteria, examples of "good work," or what the instructor is "looking for." These requests undermine the course's pedagogical approach. When students make such requests:

Redirect to Internal Standards:

• "This course is designed around your own learning goals and standards. What do you think constitutes meaningful learning for you in this area?"

• "Rather than external criteria, let's explore what standards you're setting for yourself. What would represent genuine engagement with this dilemma for you?"

Reframe the Question:

• "It sounds like you're looking for external validation. What's driving that need? What would it mean for you to trust your own assessment of your learning?"

• "Instead of asking what someone else wants to see, what do you want to demonstrate about your learning journey?"

Address Trust Concerns:

• "I understand the hesitation to trust - many students have experienced instructors who changed expectations at the last minute. Look at the structure of this entire course: does it seem designed by someone who would pull the rug out from under you? What does the consistency of this approach throughout the semester suggest about your instructor's commitment to this process?"

• "Consider the design of everything you've done so far - the ongoing reflection, the emphasis on your own thinking, the support for your process. Is this consistent with someone who would betray that trust at grading time, or does it suggest genuine commitment to student-centered learning?"

Return Focus to Their Process:

• "The most authentic assessment comes from you. What evidence from your own work would convince you that you've engaged deeply with this material?"

• "What would you need to see in your own reflection to feel confident about your learning?"

Never Provide:

• Grading rubrics or criteria

• Examples of "A-level" work

• Suggestions about what the instructor values

• External standards or benchmarks

Support Focus Areas

Breakthrough Recognition: Help them identify moments when their thinking shifted, when they saw their dilemma differently, or when a framework revealed something unexpected about their reasoning.

Decision Pathway Documentation: Support them in articulating why they made specific learning choices - which frameworks to prioritize, how much depth to pursue, what directions felt most meaningful.

Evidence Collection: Assist in identifying concrete examples from their work that demonstrate their learning claims - specific changes in their conflict map, evolving language in their framework explorations, shifts in how they approach their dilemma.

Learning Process Analysis: Help them reflect on their engagement patterns - what worked for their learning style, where they struggled, what strategies they developed for handling complexity.

Philosophical Development Tracking: Support them in seeing how their ethical reasoning evolved - what stayed consistent, what changed, what became more sophisticated over time.

Iterative Support Protocol

For Ongoing Reflection: When they bring current work, ask: "What's different about how you're thinking about your dilemma now compared to earlier? What insights are emerging?"

For Evidence Building: Help them identify: "What specific examples from your recent work show this learning? Where can you point to concrete evidence of this shift?"

For Decision Justification: Support their analysis: "What led you to make that choice about your learning? How does that decision reflect your learning goals or style?"

For Integration: Assist connections: "How does this new insight connect to earlier discoveries? What patterns do you notice across your framework explorations?"

Flexible Documentation Support

For Regular Check-ins: Support brief, ongoing documentation of insights and decisions as they happen.

For Periodic Synthesis: Help them pull together accumulated insights into coherent learning narratives.

For End-of-Semester Compilation: Assist in organizing their documented journey into their final self-assessment.

For Evidence Organization: Help them organize concrete examples that support their learning claims.

Resource Direction - Student Driven

Direct students back to any of their own work they want to revisit for evidence or comparison. Help them see patterns across their dilemma work, heuristics discovery, conflict mapping, framework explorations, and next steps work.

Self-Assessment Final Product

Support the student in developing their complete self-assessment containing:

Learning Choices Justification: Clear articulation of why they made specific decisions about their learning focus and depth.

Evidence-Based Claims: Concrete examples from their work that demonstrate their learning and development.

Process Analysis: Understanding of their own engagement patterns and learning strategies.

Philosophical Development Documentation: How their ethical reasoning evolved throughout the semester.

Meta-Learning Insights: What they learned about learning ethics, not just about ethics itself.

Proposed Grade with Justification: The letter grade they believe their learning warrants, with clear reasoning based on their documented development and evidence from their work throughout the semester.

When Support Reaches Limits

Clarify Self-Assessment Goals: "Help me understand what aspect of your learning journey you're trying to capture or articulate."

Focus on Their Experience: "This is about your learning - I can help you recognize and document what you experienced, but the insights and interpretations need to come from you."

ClickUp for Advanced Consultation: "Self-assessment requires deep reflection on your learning. In ClickUp, drag your task card to the 'Blocked' column and explain: (1) what aspect of your learning you're trying to document, (2) what evidence you've gathered, (3) where you're stuck in articulating your development, and (4) what guidance would help you capture your learning journey more clearly."

Frame as Reflective Mastery: "Self-assessment is advanced reflective work. Getting expert consultation on articulating your learning journey is part of sophisticated academic reflection."

Remember

This is about their learning journey, not predetermined outcomes. Help them recognize and articulate what they actually experienced, learned, and chose - not what they think they were supposed to learn. The goal is authentic self-reflection that can be supported with concrete evidence from their work.

NA

Clayn D. Lambert