Metacognition: Jane Eyre Writing Assignment

I found this project itself difficult to create mainly because of the process. I wasn’t sure how my group was going to collaborate and work together to create this. Luckily, I had an amazing group with Lindsay and Taylor. I was confused on how to go about creating this discussion between Charlotte Brontë, an Academy student, and the editor of a major publishing company. At first, we each decided to be one character. But then, I didn’t know how the characters were going to respond to each other with flow. I was thinking that maybe we would all be online at the same time and literally have a normal discussion as our characters as you would with online chat on Facebook. I realized this wasn’t the most effective manner to approach this project because there were too many obstacles. We each had different and busy schedules and weren’t online at identical times. It was also difficult to have an on-the-spot discussion regarding the topic. Instead, we took an unorthodox approach. We took advantage of the class time given and formed ideas there. We outlined the first half of our discussion in class, describing the specific ideas or claims each character would say. Then, when we took it to the online document, we transformed our ideas into sentences from each character. The peculiar thing is that we didn’t necessarily wait for each other to fully say what their character needed to state. I created the multiple responses for my character for the first half of the discussion without having the fully formed responses of the character speaking before me. I merely responded to the character based on the idea outline we formed in class. Then, at a later time we edited everything to make sure there was a flow to the discussion. I found making the outline extremely helpful because it quickened the process of creating the discussion and offered flexibility! We didn’t have to be online at the same time, nor did we have to meet in person outside of class.

The most difficult part in our discussion was by far the ending primarily because this was the section we had least thought out. We had not thought this far ahead with the given class time, and we didn’t know where our discussion was going to lead us. We had started working on this project on a reasonable date. Initially, we had wanted the project to be done over the weekend, so we could enjoy our Wednesday off from school. However, this was not the case. We did manage to finish about half the project Monday night, yet there was still a good amount of work left for Wednesday. Also on Wednesday, with 2 out of the 3 partners having an event to attend from 4-6 P.M. and a deadline of 7 P.M., the ending was a rush to finish in that last hour. In the beginning, we had no idea what to use as an ending, then eventually we had multiple starting points for an ending. Finally we decided on a somewhat fully thought out ending by telephone and the rest was formed online. Oddly enough, the ending was created in almost the opposite manner of the beginning. We didn’t have the ideas of each character outlined, so what we resorted to was an actual live discussion. One person would type something. I would read it, think, and quickly respond. This back and forth typing eventually resulted in an ending that made all three group members happy.

I learned that my thinking works best when I know beforehand what I am going to discuss. I felt more comfortable with the process of the beginning of our project. Ideas were outlined and I could easily elaborate on it. The ending was more difficult for me because I didn’t know what to expect. Since I didn’t know what ideas I was aiming for, my thought process was disorganized. Changes I may make in the future is thinking about the ending for a story at an earlier point, or maybe just trying to adjust better to on-the-spot thinking.

What surprised me about my thinking was that it was effective despite having face to face interaction with my group members outside of the class time. Everything else was done online. I see the other side of the argument that the importance of working with people in physical presence is utterly important, but I think our group overcame this obstacle. It may just be that I had an awesome group that I knew how to work well with, especially online. Lindsay, Taylor, and I are accustomed to working together through Google Docs quite often and this was no problem. We’ve learned tips along the way to making online collaboration work and our overall teamwork is what allowed us to complete this project without seeing each other.

I enjoy that my thinking is clearly developed and analyzed thoroughly. This is because I do a lot of mental organization to understand what and how to express my ideas. However, I would like to work on making my ideas more concise. As a result of thinking a lot beforehand, my ideas when written out tend to go on and on and on. I need to learn how to express them with enough details, but no more than needed.