Your blog assignment for the Short Work Placement (SWP)
PSY22000 Short Work Placement Unit: Reflective Blog Assignment Brief
Assignment Details, Deadlines and Weightings: You will write four, 500 word blog posts that are designed to help you to reflect on your experiences of looking for and undertaking a work placement. We expect that you will need most of this 500 word allowance to enable you to meet the marking criteria. The overall weighting for the blogs will be 70% and this will be the mean of the grades for the 4 individual blog posts that you will write. You can start writing your blog posts at any time from the beginning of Semester 2 but the final deadline for all four posts to be published is: Wednesday May 5th.
What should my blogs be about?
Your blogs will be reflective and can cover one of the themes below. You can choose any four themes from the seven below.
Please note the descriptions below are conceptual and you do not need to use the same language/terms of expression in your blogs. In fact, it would be much better if you generate your own title around these themes. In example 1 (below), for instance, I am using ‘career readiness’ in a very general sense — you could talk about ‘knowing what I want to do’, ‘figuring out my interests’, or ‘preparing for my career’.
1. Exploring your ‘career readiness’
Tips: you have completed the career self-efficacy/digital capability questionnaire & perhaps looked again at your CV: How did these experiences make you feel and what have you learned about where you are as a result of these activities? Do you feel daunted by the propect of what to do beyong university or do you feel that you have identified a path towards which you are working?
You ca find a link to the questions from these two scales here: https://medium.com/building-digital-skills-for-the-future/first-blog-the-career-digital-confidence-scales-9f2651623700……and you should have received an email from Jaymie Marinelli with your scores and your cohort scores for comparison. If you don’t have this email, contact Jaymie at jaymie.marinelli@manchester.ac.uk
2. Finding and applying for opportunities/your short work placement
Tip/suggestions: How did you decide what to look for and/or apply to? How is/was the process: daunting, exciting, rewarding? Have you looked for opportunities and not found them?
3. Your placement: the organisation you work/volunteer with and your learning about the sector they operate in. What did you do here? What did you learn?
Tip/suggestion: You must think about what you are allowed to share on a published blog and how you talk about your placement organisation. This blog will be published and so what you write will be accessible to anyone. You must also ensure that any images/information that you take from an organisation’s website are properly referenced/acknowledged.
4. One early experience at your placement and what you learned about yourself
Tip/suggestions: Decide how much you want to share about yourself. Remember to consider your Digital Identity. You can, if you want, write about and share an experience where your reflections lead you to some thoughts and feelings that are sensitive and typically private but think carefully about doing this. You can perform ‘deep reflection’ (higher grades) about experiences where the revelations are not about sensitive or (to you) private learnings — for example: A positive or negative experience might make you consider “What ‘types’ of people do I enjoy being around”? You could outline the process and outcome of reflection around that.
5. One later experience at your placement and what you learned about yourself
Tip/suggestions: Try to identify an experience that happened later in your placement than the first (no. 4) and aim to link your reflections one to the other (don’t worry if you can’t make this work). Always try to consider past experiences (even if not from the same placement) and how they can inform your current reflections.
6. Towards the end of the academic year: Has anything changed? Have your experiences changed your thinking about your future?
Tips/Suggestions: You should write this blog when you have completed most of your 2nd year. By that point you will have learned a lot, completed lots of assignments and had many interactions and of course, finished your placement module: Do you feel any different to when/where you started? Have you figured anything out that you want to focus on? Don’t feel that it all has to be super-positive — just be authentic and demonstrate what you have learned and what you can do with that learning for your future.
7. ‘Online working AND ME’. This year has been unprecedented in that there has been no face-to-face teaching and all learning has been remote. What has the lock down and move to online learning been like for you? How has it impacted on your life and thoughts about your future etc? Have there been any changes that relate to your ambitions — hopes and fears for you future ‘career’? Again, be authentic. Whatever you want to tell us is absolutely fine but remember that your blog is public so be careful not to bring yourself or the university into disrepute.
You can access the Marking Criteria for the blogs here: XXXXXXX
Who is the intended audience for my blogs?
Your blogs should be written to appeal to an audience of undergraduate students who are motivated to read and/or learn about what others like them think and do about their career preparations. You can decide whether to refer specifically to ‘Psychology’ as your discipline.
How do I submit?
Your blog writing and creation will be supported using online materials and through attendance at a session in Week 1 or Semester 2. You can also email doron.cohen@manchester.ac.uk for support. You must submit a PDF version of each of your blog posts to Blackboard and you can also choose not to publish your blog posts on Medium, although we strongly encourage you to consider publishing as this will help you to enhance your digital literacy skills. See below for how to create a pdf from your Medium blog so that you can submit it to Bb.
Here is the link in Medium that tells you how to print to a pdf creator in case you don’t know: https://medium.com/@billyhalim/how-to-save-a-web-page-as-a-pdf-11e83f976117
You will need to set up your Medium account to create your blog, but you can delete each story as soon as you have created your pdf if you do not want to punblish publicly.
Are there any guidelines for writing and creating my blog?
You will find a number of links to resources to support you in creating your blog here https://medium.com/building-digital-skills-for-the-future/support-for-your-assessment-d8e900fa0ea1
Reflective Learning
We want your blogs to be as reflecive as possible. You should demonstrate reflection by writing about both the process and outcome of your reflection. This means moving beyond the descriptive, and subjecting your experience to greater scrutiny.
Reflective writing is evidence of reflective thinking. In an academic context, reflective thinking involves:
- Looking back at something (often an event, i.e. something that happened on placement).
- Analysing the event (thinking in depth and from different perspectives, and trying to explain).
- Thinking carefully about what the event means for you and your ongoing progress as a learner and a person exploring your possible future.
To help structure reflective thinking into a reflective writing piece for your blog, it might be useful to consider: What? So what? Now what?
- What? means a description: a short summary of what happened in which you only focuss on the relevant aspects of the event.
- So what? is an interpretation of what is interesting, relevant and important about the event. Is the event similar or different to other previous experiences (even outside of a workplace, e.g. in University, Society, home-life etc.)
- Now what? is a consideration of the outcome of the event for yourself, for now and in your future. How has it changed your or made you think differently?
Reflective writing is characterised by ‘revealing’ through outlining the process of revelation, who you are and for this assignment, how who you are informs where you might ‘fit’ in the future.
Here are some references that will be useful if you want to learn more about reflective writing and thinking.
Boud, D. & Walker, D. (1985) Barriers to reflection on experience, in D. Boud, R.Keogh and D.Walker (Eds.) Reflection: Turning Experience into Learning. Kogan Page, London.
Mezirow, J. (1991) Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco:
