Attendance, Participation, and Assessment

The expectation is that you will attend all sessions and involve yourself in the class process. Your willingness to engage creatively with the learning process, to take appropriate personal risks, and to participate in group activities are all central to your involvement in this class. Developing a sense of personal, academic, and professional direction is very much a process of blending your own personal awareness with abilities and practical techniques. Therefore, your own emotional involvement in the class is as important as your academic knowledge of the material.

You will be expected to attend lectures, participate actively, and complete all course assignments. While attendance is voluntary (as it is in most post-secondary courses), the key to success in any course involves taking time to integrate material from lectures, discussions, activities, and your own reflections. If you miss class, it is your responsibility to catch up. Please ask your instructor if you are unsure about how to do this.

The following (not exhaustive) list of considerations will be used in determining the quality of your attendance and participation:

Assessment Criteria for Attendance and Participation

• Demonstration of commitment to self-development.
• Openness to interpersonal process.
• Ability to participate in appropriate self-disclosure.
• Consideration of and responsiveness to others.
• Willingness to take appropriate risks and to challenge oneself.
• Commitment to enhancing the interpersonal experience of everyone
• Ability to take personal responsibility for learning.
• Willingness to deal with conflicts appropriately
• Ability to be open and responsive to appropriate feedback.
• Willingness to speak up and to contribute.

Assessment Philosophy

Effective participation in this class has multiple dimensions, some of which may be measured objectively (such as effective writing) and some of which are signals of interpersonal ability and self-awareness. Interpersonal abilities are subtle, difficult to quantify, complex beyond any measurement scheme, and are the single most important predictor of life success. Accordingly, we pay great attention to interpersonal ability in this class, and we offer the following guidelines for assessing your own development in this area:

Those who possess exemplary personal abilities are relaxed, open, responsive, and kind. Often they exhibit abilities that we tend to assign to the social sphere: personal warmth, consideration of others, hesitancy to judge, sensitivity to emotions. To some extent, these features – which are aspects of temperament more than they are learned skills – can be evaluated using rating scales based on observation. Empathy rating scales are often used for this purpose in counselling training programs. Such scales, or other, similar assessment measures, are useful as baselines, or starting points; but they cannot replace the interpretations of peers and colleagues – of regular people, in other words – in assessing the quality of interpersonal ability. There are simply far too many factors in interpersonal communication for any standardized evaluation procedure to measure.

On the other hand, many details of interpersonal ability are well-known, and may be summarized as follows:

• Commitment to the development of self-awareness.
• Openness to interpersonal process.
• Ability to participate in appropriate self-disclosure.
• Consideration of and responsiveness to others.
• Commitment to enhancing interpersonal experience.
• Willingness to examine personal values, beliefs, and judgements.
• Ability to take personal responsibility for learning.
• Willingness to deal with conflicts appropriately.
• Ability to be open and responsive to appropriate feedback.

Please pay attention to these qualities and abilities as we move forward.