Dear Jokke,
now I have to reflect about the reflection assignment task. Next, I will have to reflect about the reflection about the reflection assignment task. I sometimes wonder whether there is any limit to the level of indirection. Something like this I did already in the reflection assignment itself, but I became aware of this final task ("7. Attach an evaluation of your own working to the reflection assignment and give yourself a grade for the assignment.") only today when I was about to submit the final version of my reflection assignment.

The reflection assignment was cobbled together from my lecture notes and thus does rather reflect the chaotic and cumbersome struggle towards some level of understanding instead of a coherent analysis of the course or a streamlined development towards an improved pedagogical thinking. Looking at the assessment criteria, I clearly should grade this reflection assignment a 3. But since in this inflationary university environment a 3 is regarded already a "bad" mark, I will grade myself instead a 4.

Clearly, the assignment is lacking the excellence that is required for a 4-5, but most of the other criteria a met (somehow). However, the "rich" is limited to 4 pages and I had to throw out much material (and tweak font size, borders and whatnot in order to stay within the limit). This is especially true for the final version, which could have included the material from the 2nd half of the course, if it wasn't for the 4-page-limit. In any case the final version is just a updated version of the 1st draft (also in order to rescue my X-mas holidays, which comprised already enough grant reporting deadlines). 

It is rather challenging to do compress the topics of this course into four pages plus introspecting one''s own development. If I am not mistaken, none of the journal articles that we used in this course limited itself to 4 pages. Rather the opposite was the case: Most of them were much longer while discussing only one aspect of the many which we were supposed to discuss on 4 pages. If anybody did a good job of that assignment, I would really like to read it!

Thanks for the course & happy new year! 

Michael